Catalyst
by Jaenelle Angelline
Summary: A Person of Interest novel. A serial killer surfaces in New York-twice-but the Machine fails to give the team his number. Why? And what will the team do when the killer picks one of their own as his next target? Written as a revisionist version of a Carter-Reese first kiss; contains some details from 'Crossing'. 1/12/13: Chapter 10 updated and companion short 'Ask' added to site.
1. Chapter 1: Cold

**Person of Interest: Catalyst**

**Chapter 1: Cold**

2011

Cold.

It was the only way Detective Jocelyn Carter could describe what she was seeing. Whoever did this was cold.

It wasn't just the way this dead victim had been posed—because this was definitely a staged tableaux; the marble-pale arms stretched out on either arm of the life-size wooden cross didn't have enough blood on them to account for the woman to have been crucified ante-mortem. The woman's arms had been tied to the cross before the nails were placed, after death and before rigor had set in.

It wasn't just the way she'd been killed, either, although that too had been particularly gruesome. Something—most likely a large knife—had been used to slash the victim's lower belly open, but it was a careful, calculated cut. Whoever the killer was, he'd had some knowledge of female anatomy; Carter could see the cut didn't hit any other internal organs. There was just enough blood here to indicate this had been done post-mortem, but hadn't hit any major arteries or veins. Surgical precision indeed.

Maybe it was the way the victim's head was covered; wrapped in the remnants of what must have been the victim's own jacket, the arms tied around the head and knotted over the eyes. There was a bulge, however, around where the mouth would be—the victim was gagged, then hooded, adding another level of misery to the victim's last moments. She wouldn't have been able to see what her killer was going to do, couldn't anticipate. And the killer wouldn't have had to look at her face while he cut her up, reducing it to a very impersonal killing.

Maybe it was also the way that the victim's clothing had been removed. Everything from the waist down was gone, but from the waist up, the remains of a shirt, cut up the middle, hugged her torso. There was even a knife laceration on her sternum, between milky breasts, where the knife had been used to cut the bra open. That bra still hung off the shoulders, along with the slit shirt, and Carter would bet real money that some of the fibers from the shirt would be found in the belly wound.

It could also be the way that the legs had been positioned. In original, old-Roman style historic crucifixions, the feet were nailed to either side of the main upright. That was what the killer had done, but he'd nailed the foot with the sole flat to the side of the square beam, splaying the legs open like the wings of a butterfly.

But what really did it for Carter was the impact of the entire scene. Although there was no way to know, at the moment, if the woman had been sexually assaulted before death, it was likely; yet everything about the scene and the murder thus far had been calculated but still very impersonal. Her gut instinct—her Detective instinct—was telling Carter that the woman hadn't known her killer, and she might just have been a random person that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Which would also explain why the 'Man-in-the-suit' hadn't intervened.

She crouched next to the body, examining it with critical eyes and scribbling details in her notepad even as she thought about her 'stealth' partners. Well, really, she couldn't even call them partners, but since she'd first crossed paths with John Reese nearly a year ago, she'd developed first a healthy respect for him—and his bespectacled friend, Harold Finch—which had grown to liking after John Reese had helped rescue her son. Now they were erstwhile partners and friends—although that particular appellation didn't really adequately describe the complicated relationship she had with John and Finch.

It had also become a secret source of amusement for her, when talk among the conspiracy theorists at the precinct turned to the urban legend who had been dubbed 'Man-in-the-suit.' She smiled at the near-supernatural powers that were being ascribed to the Man-in-the-suit, and while some might have thought that her smile was one of incredulous disdain, what she really smiled about was what she could imagine John would think at hearing himself thus described. Yes, it was true that he moved very fast, but that wasn't mind-reading, that was simply great reflexes honed by military Special Forces training, coupled with—well, she knew not all of his skills had been developed in the military, but she had no idea where he'd acquired—and honed—some of his other skills.

And honestly, deep down she didn't really want to know.

She supposed that made her somewhat pragmatic; well, then fine, she'd be a pragmatist. She did harbor a little curiosity about who he'd been before she met him, and would have liked to know about his past; but truthfully, knowing who he really was and where he'd come from—and what made him what he was—wouldn't make a bit of difference in the here-and-now. He was here, and he had helped her out on numerous occasions—and she'd helped him—so as far as she was concerned, it was quid-pro-quo. They didn't owe her anything, and she didn't have any right to ask from him and Finch more than they were willing to give.

She stabbed a last period on the end of the sentence she'd just written on her pad and rose, kicking her left leg a bit to work out the slight cramp that had developed in her calf since she'd first crouched to examine the body, and signaled to a uni to come and cover the body with a sheet until the coroner got here, then stood and took stock of the surroundings.

'Here' was the back of an abandoned train depot. Old wooden railroad ties littered the depot yard, which was doubtless where the killer had gotten the wood to make the crucifix. There were old nails littering the ground here too, and on a sudden inspiration, she stepped back to the body and looked at the cross, wondering if the old nails here had been used to make the cross.

And as she bent closer to check the nails and fastenings holding the two pieces at right angles to each other, she noticed something interesting. The woman's arms had been tied in place before being nailed down—yes, she had noticed that already, the ropes were still in place—but what she hadn't noticed on her first inspection was the way the ropes were tied. From her military training, she recognized it as a chain hitch, with rope wrapped around the crosspiece and arm in a classic hitch that was connected to another with a twist of the rope, each hitch 'chained' to the last hitch until it reached the wrist. And then, instead of securing it with a regular knot, it was secured around the woman's wrist with a clove hitch, another knot learned by military recruits during basic training. Except this was no inexpertly-tied knot, whoever had done this was experienced at it and had tied the knot as quickly and efficiently as if they were used to such complicated tying every day.

She noted that on her pad as she examined the cross looking for her original quarry. Yes, the nails were rusted and weathered; the nails had been here, then, and had just been used to create the cross on which the victim was crucified. All 'local materials', then, which argued for the fact that the killer had simply made use of the available materials and this had been neither premeditated nor planned. As she stepped back to let the coroner load the body into a wagon for transport to the morgue, a grim smile curved her lips for a fleeting second. For all John and Finch's uncanny ability to locate someone to whom a crime was about to happen and prevent the crime from happening, there was still no substitute for good old-fashioned detective work when it came to the random imaginative craziness that humans were all too capable of when it came to hurting each other.

"Got what you need?" Fusco wandered over, holding out a cup of hot coffee. She smiled gratefully at him, tucking her pad back into her breast pocket and reaching for the cup; it was almost unseasonably cold, for a late October afternoon. Her fingers tingled with the heat emanating from the flimsy cup, and she paused to take a sip, savoring the warmth as it filled her mouth and slid down her throat. He had one too, and seemed to welcome the warmth even through his gloves.

"I think so." She hadn't liked him, to start with; but with the recent revelation that he knew John and Finch too, their working partnership had thawed from its original frosty temperature to a genuine ability to work with each other, and even a bit of sympathy and common ground. Taylor had recently met Lee, and the boys had found some common ground at discovering that they were both children of working cop single parents, and Carter had reluctantly admitted to herself long since that despite her initial reservations at working with Fusco, he was a solid, good worker and she liked the thought that he had her back. "Man, I tell ya, Fusco, I don't like this. It looks like this killer had it planned, but his use of local materials—the stuff in this railyard—indicates that he didn't really have this thought out at all. And yet, the way he displayed her body after he killed her—that's just cold."

"Cold." Fusco nodded understandingly. "Yeah, that's how I'd describe it too. Cold. It was personal, but not personally against the victims."

"And not premeditated. If it were premeditated it would have come to the attention of our friends—" she stopped speaking as a uniformed officer came up to her. "Hey, Officer…" her eyes flicked to the name tag on the uniform. Brand new, not a scratch on it yet—green rookie, wet behind the ears, "…Officer Robinson. Got the crime scene secured?"

"Uh, sorry, Ma'am. Whoever was at the motorpool today didn't make sure the trunk was equipped before I took the car out on patrol. I don't have any crime tape."

She nodded and smiled at him. "That's okay, I got some." She handed her coffee cup to Fusco, extracted a roll of the black and yellow plastic ribbon from her own trunk, and tossed it at the rookie, who caught it neatly. "There you go, Officer Robinson. Make sure you get a good five foot radius around where the body was lying, okay? We don't want the crowd getting too close and disturbing the crime scene."

"Yes Ma'am! Thank you, Ma'am!" Robinson nodded crisply and moved off toward his patrol car, and she and Fusco watched him go.

"Damn, Fusco. Is it just me, or are they recruitin' these guys younger and younger?" She shook her head wonderingly. "I hate it when they call me 'Ma'am'. Makes me feel old."

"It's not just you," Fusco sighed as he turned back to their car. "All right, come on, let's go, there's going to be lots of paperwork with this one, and I promised Lee I'd take him to a basketball game tonight."

"Yeah, last thing you want to do is disappoint your kid." Fusco started to look up at her with a hurt look, but was stopped by her broad smile. "I was joking, Fusco. Remember I'm a parent too, I know how this goes. Lighten up, will you?" He grinned at her, slightly sheepishly, and reached for the door of the car.

She was sitting at her desk, much later, flipping through crime scene photos as she filled out her report. They'd caught another case just before shift end (big surprise, there) and mindful of Fusco's promise to Lee, she'd practically ordered Fusco to get out of the station and take his son to the promised basketball game. After all, wasn't there an old saying 'If you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans?' The gods weren't going to laugh at Fusco's plans, not if she had anything to say about it. And she did—Taylor had called her to say he was studying for a test at a friend's house, and he wanted her to come pick him up at seven PM, which left her with an hour to finish up the paperwork on both their end-of-shift case and the staged murder victim case from earlier today. And maybe, if Finch and John weren't busy, she could bounce the details of the crucified victim case off John. Having a fresh pair of eyes couldn't hurt, especially not with a murder as gruesome as this one, and maybe she could get a few details closer to finding out how they knew about the premeditated cases but this one slipped under their radar…

Her cellphone rang, and she grabbed it. Speak of the devil… she grinned to herself when she saw 'unknown' on the caller ID. Formerly these 'unknown' callers were telemarketers, or crank calls, but since her working relationship with Finch and John had developed into an easy friendship, she'd suddenly found out the only time her phones (either cell or home) said 'unknown' it was John or Finch. She supposed it was one of those perks that came with working with a technological genius—fine, that was one perk she was only too happy to accept. And it also reinforced her sense of fairness; while yes, it did make her more easily reachable to them, it was a tiny simple gesture by them that was nevertheless enormously appreciated by Carter; and there was that pesky quid-pro-quo again that simply made her hesitate to ask them for any details beyond what they willingly shared with her. "Carter," she said into the phone, and didn't care that her smile came out in her voice.

"Good evening, Carter," and her smile deepened at that husky tenor. John had a very distinctive voice, whether he knew it or not; she had no idea how he could project so much of his emotion into a simple tonal change. He didn't have to shout for her to know he was angry; didn't have to laugh for her to know he was in a good mood; barely had to flatten the cadence of his voice for her to know when he was in one of his 'dangerously angry' moods, the one that didn't bode well for whoever shortly would be on the other end of his fist. Right now she could detect a slightly cheerful tone, but there was also an edge to it that said he had spent his day out doing something strenuous—probably helping someone else, she surmised—and there was still too much adrenaline racing through him for him to be able to settle down.

She took a quick look at her watch. Still half an hour before she had to pick Taylor up. And one of John's favorite 'quiet' bars—a place where he went to wind down from a day, not a dive where he looked for trouble—was right between her and Taylor's friend Rodney's house. "Hey, John."

"You sound tired." Damn the man, how the hell did he do that?

Well, two could play that game. She huffed out a breath in a laugh. "And you sound like you're winding down after a fight."

A pause, just the barest hint, half a heartbeat, but she smiled broadly to herself. _Got you, didn't I? That time, at least._ "You're getting better, detective."

She couldn't help it; she chuckled, a little laugh at his expense. "Well, you didn't call me 'detective' for nothing."

She heard the smile in his voice. He didn't laugh often; it wasn't in his (dark and brooding) nature. The few times she'd seen him laugh it almost always had a trace of irony, anger, bitterness, or some other emotion in it, so she treasured the times when she could bring a true smile to his face and voice. "Touché," he admitted, and she smiled to herself again, this time fondly. Few men as…intensely masculine…as John Reese was were able to laugh at themselves; somehow this just made him seem even more appealing to her. "So I'm sure, as a detective, you're well aware of what I'm going to ask you."

"Sure. You were about to ask me to meet you at The Tavern in five minutes." It was a guess; it was where she wanted to go, and it also gave John an out; if he wanted to see her tonight, he would acknowledge it; if he'd just been calling to say hi and wanted to go immediately to his…home, wherever it was, and crash, well, he could do so too, and she would neither be hurt nor harmed by it.

"Well, you said it, you aren't a detective for nothing." She let out the breath she'd unconsciously been holding and started to gather her things and load her purse. His tacit acceptance of her subtle invitation was a relief to her; she hadn't realized until just now that she really did want to see him tonight, and she wanted to bounce the details of the crucifixion murder off him, see what he thought. And eventually, Finch too, since she was sure that what one knew, so did the other.

"All right, so I'll see you in five. Not too long, I have to pick Taylor up at his friend's house at seven, but I caught this new case and I'd appreciate a fresh pair of eyes." She didn't really like asking them for help—this was her job, not theirs—but she'd gradually learned to stop feeling guilty about it since they did ask her to help them with their job occasionally. Another of those pesky quid-pro-quo things that was beneficial to all of them.

"I'll be glad to lend you my eyes."

She smiled. "See you in five then." The file with the crucifixion victims photos in it went into her bag, and thus out the door with her.


	2. Chapter 2: Deja Vu

**Chapter 2: Déjà vu**

_Author's note: I am absolutely floored by the number of responses I've thus far received from the readers—and by the number of people following the story. There are a lot of mature themes in this novel, but central to all of it are the relationships all of our various characters share with each other that allow them to do 'whatever this is', as Joss calls it. So for those looking for action, yes, there will be plenty of it starting about Chapter 8; but I'm starting this off with an in-depth look at how I perceive these characters relate to each other because it's going to be very important in the second half of the novel when they team up to take down HR. Yes, HR is going down—as I said, it's a revisionist history—but HR is going down _my _way. I loved what the producers did on the show, how they did it, and I realize they never planned for Joss Carter to be a character on the show past the third season, and the way they tied off many of the loose ends in 'Crossing and 'Devil's Share' was masterful (Elias taking out Simmons because of a 'remaining debt' was perfect)—it's just not the way I would have done it. Joss is staying on the team because there are so many issues John Reese has, emotionally and mentally, that can be explored in the relationship he has with her._

_Some of the reviewers are already familiar with my writing (thanks, Bronwyn, for being willing to read something that you don't have a frame of reference for!) but for those of you who haven't read any of my previous writing (almost all of which is posed here on ) all I can say is buckle up and brace yourself. I'm about to take you on a wild ride! _

2013

There was a weird sense of déjà-vu, this time.

Deserted railroad yard, which Carter got a strange feeling she'd seen before. Abandoned wooden railroad ties in various states of age and dilapidation lay scattered around; nails and screws and bits of rusted metal that might once have been nails and screws and other similar hardware littered the ground. A pile of rope off to one side of the yard lay somewhat scattered, as if someone had gone through the pile looking for pieces of usable length.

And then as she and Laskey, her new young rookie, rounded the corner of the dilapidated railroad depot building, it hit her all over again. Same yard. Same ties. Same nails and bits of metal.

Different victim.

This woman was the same age as the other one, from a couple of years ago. Female, in her late twenties to early thirties; nude from the waist down and nailed to a makeshift cross made of discarded railroad ties. But there was significantly more blood this time, Officer Carter saw as she stepped close enough to the body to scan it with a detective's eyes and a detective's instinct. Although the skin this time was milk chocolate, she could see more blood around the nails in the palms, and the fingers were half-curled in a spasm of agony—her hands had been nailed while she was still alive. Shirt and bra cut open, laying bare the torso; jacket same as last time, wrapped around the victim's head, prominent bulge right where the mouth would be.

Carter remembered with sudden clarity the coroner's report from the victim in her case two years ago; the woman, identified later as Annelise Murry, had been viciously beaten about her head and face while gagged, which had caused her death; she'd sustained significant head trauma and vomited. The gag hadn't let her clear the bile from her mouth and throat, and she had aspirated it into her nasal cavities, then into her lungs, essentially drowning in her own vomit; when she'd been unconscious her killer had wrapped her jacket around her head. A small mercy; she'd been dead by the time he'd nailed her hands down and cut her belly open in a ritualistic gesture that still mystified Carter two years later; the killer had never been found.

And as she stared at the black woman crucified on the cross in front of her, she again felt a surge of angry regret, too familiar lately, that she no longer had her detective's badge. As the investigating detective on the last murder, this would have landed on her desk, and she would have been given a second chance to catch this killer. Months had gone by after Annelise's death, and her case remained unsolved, and many in the department had hoped that it had been the work of a transient killer, someone just passing through New York on his way…somewhere else. Although Carter hated the thought that someone else, somewhere else, might die, at least no one else who had been murdered the way Annelise had been murdered had shown up in New York.

Until today.

Laskey had already started taping off the railroad yard, preserving the crime scene; but due to the cold, there were (thankfully) few onlookers. A woman had been walking a dog, the dog had slipped its leash and run, and the woman had found the dog in the abandoned railyard sniffing interestedly at the dead body. And that was how Carter and Laskey had ended up here.

She heard the crunch of gravel from another car's tires behind her, and knew it would be whatever detective had caught this case this time; but she ignored their presence fro a moment, focusing on something. With Annelise, the killer had used military knots to secure her arms to the cross. On this body, it was the same; the discarded railyard ropes in a chain hitch down the arm to a clove hitch around the wrist…

A hand grabbed her arm, yanked her up, and she looked up into the scowling face of a male detective. "No contaminating the crime scene," the detective snarled.

"I wasn't going to touch the body, Detective Robinson," she snapped, though inwardly wondered at the strangeness of the world. Full circle, but the roles now were reversed; Robinson had been an officer at the last crucifixion murder, and now he was the detective…and _she_ was the officer. She had to fight down another pang of angry regret. "In case you don't remember, this is the same place we found another murdered, crucified young woman two years ago, Annelise Murray."

"Yeah. And you know what else I remember?" Robinson snapped, leaning so close she could smell alcohol on his breath. "I remember I'm a detective now and you got busted back to an officer. I don't have to listen to you anymore, you have to listen to me. And I don't want you near my crime scene. As soon as another set of uni's get here, I want you and your greenhorn out of this yard."

"All right," she said with a sigh; no use arguing with the man. "But, Robinson…the knots tying this victim to this cross are the same military-style knots that tied Annelise Murray two years ago."

He paused in mid-stride, caught in the act of walking away. She was sure he heard her; but when he turned around his face was cold and hard and set. "I don't recall asking for your input, _Officer_," he said, the tone of his voice on the last word making it more of an insult than a title. "Now take your greenie and get out of here."

What could she say? She couldn't argue with the man—she was a mere officer, he was the detective. "Come on, Laskey," she said to the young rookie standing off to one side, sure that he'd just heard the entire exchange and mortified at what he might be thinking at the moment. "We got another call." A clear lie, but he didn't call her on it; just got in the car and they peeled out of the yard. And fortunately for her, they did catch another call a minute later and the rest of the afternoon was spent trying to break up a disturbance between a divorcing couple, and she had her hands full trying to keep an angry woman from going after her husband with an eggbeater.

It didn't help her mood any when she got home; It was Taylor's weekend with his father, and she had the apartment to herself. She slammed into the apartment, slammed the door, slammed her keys and purse and gun on the table, and stomped her way into her bedroom, where she changed into a shapeless, comfortably worn pair of jeans and an equally shapeless, equally comfortable hooded sweatshirt. Then she stomped her way into the kitchen and sat at the kitchen island determined to acquaint herself with the bottom of a half-gallon of rocky road.

But when she finished it she was still no closer to a good mood than she'd been when she sat down. The folder with the details of the murder case, swiped from Robinson's desk at the precinct, sat on her table, silently mocking her; right next to the folder with Annelise's case in it, a two year old unsolved cold case, and in a shock of momentary fury, she hurled both folders across the room, ignoring the snowfall of papers that showered her couch and living room as she stomped into her kitchen. Pitching the now-empty ice cream container in the trashcan with disgust, she fumed her way into the bedroom, stuffed her feet into her running shoes, grabbed her purse, and headed on foot out of her apartment building. There was a bar about two blocks from her apartment building, and if she got drunk enough maybe she wouldn't care about Robinson's snub, about the new dead girl, about Annelise Murray, about the Crucifixion Killer, as he'd now been unofficially dubbed.

She was halfway through a bottle of barely-decent cheap whiskey when a shadow detached himself from the other shadows surrounding this booth she'd found empty at the back of the bar, and John Reese slipped into the seat facing her. "Mindreading again?" she asked acerbically. She wasn't mad at him, she was just angry, in general, and she had drunk just enough, by now, to not care anymore who she lashed out at.

John Reese studied the woman across the booth tossing back another shot glass of whiskey. He knew she wasn't angry at him. Knew she was angry about something, but it wasn't him. She was hurting and lashing out, and he understood even while a part of him, that overprotective male instinctive part of him, wanted to go hunt down whatever or whoever had made Joss Carter angry. It wasn't a rational thought, wasn't reasonable, didn't make sense, but there it was. He'd long since come to grips with the fact that where his life and Joss Carter's life entwined, touched, few things were going to make sense, nothing was going to fall into a neatly-definable, compartmentalized box. And truth to tell, he was rather intrigued at how her simple presence could bring chaos into his well-ordered mental world.

But tonight wasn't the night for this; this wasn't the time to quietly analyze anything. It was really very simple; Joss was hurting, and he was her friend, and if lashing out at him would alleviate her hurt, he didn't care if she used him like that. What else were friends for? But he'd figure out what was bothering her, and fix it. He could fix anything.

Or so he thought until she started talking.

She was well past 'getting drunk' and more than halfway to being 'completely drunk.' Just enough alcohol to release the curb she usually kept on her mind and her tongue, and the tumble of words that came out showed him just how much he'd missed. It had been a few weeks since they'd had a chance to talk; none of Finch's numbers had been to anyone that the NYPD, and Carter specifically, could help with, and he hadn't needed to ask her or Fusco to help with information either. And she was very good at hiding what she was feeling, usually…but the harsh looks, the snubbing she'd gotten from the people at the precinct at her having been broken back down to beat cop, her being saddled with this incompetent Laskey when they both would rather have been somewhere else, doing anything else but ride a beat patrol together, had been wearing on Carter's patience until Joss had snapped.

He listened to her in silence, offering an occasional noncommittal syllable here and there, until she had talked herself out and was on the verge of collapsing. That was when he silently paid her tab for her and got her out of the bar. She drank, but she was responsible about it. He already knew this; when she wanted to do some serious drinking she never took her car, she always walked, and even inebriated she never drank so much she wasn't aware of her surroundings. She was walking in a straight line, more or less, when they left the bar, and when they got to her apartment it only took a few seconds of fumbling before she got the door open and he followed her inside.

She didn't apologize for the scattered papers; he didn't comment on it either, just raised an eyebrow at this very un-Joss-like burst of sloppiness. She gathered up the papers in a jumble, slapping them down on the table, and flopped down on her couch, turning on the TV. And the first thing they both saw was Robinson speaking to a news reporter about the Crucifixion Killer having struck again.

Tears rolled down Joss's cheeks, and John quietly sat on the end of the couch. She hunched against the opposite arm, sniffling, and he handed her tissues as he listened with one ear to the news repot and used the other to listen to Joss's disjointed rambling. "He wouldn't even listen when I told it's the same kind of knots—military style knots in the ropes used to tie the new victim. Just like the knots used on Annelise Murray. Damn it, I should have tried harder to find the killer when Annelise turned up—if I had maybe this new victim wouldn't have died…" And then she was crying, harsh racking sobs shaking her, and John couldn't bear to hear those guilt-ridden sounds coming from her. He wrapped his arms around her, and she leaned against him and cried.

He held her, and just let her cry; Joss, for all her stubborn ways, toughness and confidence, had her breaking points too. This was one of them, and John was just glad that he'd had a sudden urge to stop by tonight and check up on her. She probably wouldn't have called him just to say she wanted to talk; she was very undemanding, rarely initiated conversation unless it was an emergency, and never would she have initiated contact on her own behalf. If he hadn't stopped by, she would have gotten drunk, saw herself home, then curled up in her own bed and cried herself to sleep. Alone. He held her as her sobs quieted into sleep, exhausted by the emotions of the day, and only when he heard her deep, gentle, rhythmic breaths and was convinced she was asleep did he untangle his arms from around her, settle her back into the couch cushions, then head for her linen closet for a blanket to tuck around her.

That done, he returned to the kitchen and sorted through the mess of papers on the table, figuring out which reports and paperwork went with which victim's folder. He studied the pictures carefully; sure enough, Carter was right. The ropes binding Annelise's arms to the cross were tied in a chain hitch, tied off at the wrist with a clove hitch, and few of your normal, run-of-the-mill killers would have thought to use these particular types of knots. Yes, kids were taught these types of knots in organizations like the Boy Scouts, but no mere Boy Scout would have remembered those knots so far into adulthood, and neither would they have been so proficient at tying them. This had to have been done by someone in the military, and also someone with medical knowledge.

The cut on Murray's belly had been precise; easy to do when she had been dead at the time the cut was made. But on the second victim, it was evident that the cut was equally precise even though the massive amounts of blood smeared on the dark skin of this second woman showed she had still been alive when the cut had been made. The hands, curled spasmodically into agonized claws, caught his attention next, and he studied them carefully, knowing why Joss felt so angry. The way in which the second victim was murdered had clearly been a step up from the first case, Carter's case, two years ago—Murray had been dead when the nails had been driven into her hands, and this was clearly not the case with the second.

He sat down, then, and read the coroner's report on Murray; asphyxiated on her own vomit, driven from her by a vicious beating about her face and head that, even if the killer hadn't chosen to murder her, would have likely produced irreversible brain damage. Anger surged in John; anger on the new, still-faceless victim's behalf, anger on Murray's behalf, and anger on Joss's behalf. Joss felt guilty that she hadn't tried harder to find Annelise Murray's killer; John was angry with himself. That night, two years ago, when Joss had met him at The Tavern, he'd been in a good mood, so had she, and he'd only skimmed the case folder, not paying much attention because he didn't want to ruin the evening.

Maybe if he had ruined that evening, Joss's evening wouldn't have been ruined tonight.

He was going to have a talk with Finch about why the Machine hadn't given them this new victim's number; why it hadn't given them Annelise's number. Or, if the killer had randomly picked these two women out, why the Machine hadn't given them the killer's number. John had no doubts that this was a serial killer, the two murders were too similar. The victims were apparently about the same age, and although at the time the crime scene photos had been taken the jacket hadn't been unwound from the second victim's head, John felt sure that they would find that she too had asphyxiated in her own vomit from a similarly severe, vicious beating. John was positive the killer was escalating, and that each killing had been carefully thought out and planned, yet the Machine had known nothing about it.

And as he studied the second victim's picture, a disturbing thought passed through his mind, and his fist closed involuntarily, so tight his knuckles whitened. He never noticed it. In his mind's eye, he saw Joss tied down, choking as she was beaten…

"No," he barely recognized his own fear-distorted whisper. "Not Joss." It was unlikely, highly unlikely; she was a cop, tough, capable, able to take care of herself, trained in self-defense by both police and military. But still his life had taught him that anything was possible, and while he couldn't imagine a situation where Joss would ever be this helpless, he still couldn't discount it altogether.

He'd lately been thinking of teaching her some of the more unorthodox moves that he knew, moves that hadn't come from any military training manual or civilian cop self-defense class. The dirty tricks that would win you a street fight and quite likely leave your opponent crippled, if not dead outright. And looking down at these pictures, and imagining Joss there—the two victims were about the same age, same body type, and one was an African American woman, with skin only a few shades lighter than Joss's own…no. It hurt too much for him to even think of her as a victim.

There were few things in his life that John Reese was afraid of, and none of them were for himself. And honestly, not much for Harold Finch, or Zoe Morgan, or Sam Shaw either. All of them had chosen to do what they did, outliers on the fringe of society, watching it but not part of it except insofar as they took out whoever was disturbing society. Joss Carter, though, was different. She was part of society, an integral part, and she touched so many lives, helped so many people, that yes, there would be a significant hole left if she were no longer a part of it. And although he didn't examine his own heart and soul too carefully, deep down inside he knew that if something happened to her there would be a wound left in his own soul.

_Self-defense classes, then. Wonder if I can talk Shaw into giving Carter her Nano? Or get her one of her own? And I'm going to talk to Finch about this. Why didn't the Machine give us these women's numbers, or the killer's when he picked them out?_


	3. Chapter 3: Morning

**Chapter 3: Morning**

_Author's note: Normally I post one chapter a week, but I'm going to break with that tradition this week because chapters 2 and 3 really do need to be read !_

The smell of freshly-roasted coffee drew Joss out of a deep, sound sleep—much sounder and deeper than she'd been getting for about a week now. There had been a tight knot of anger and tension in the pit of her stomach—stress, she reasoned—that wasn't there now.

What there was, however, was a dry mouth and a furry tongue; she grimaced as she opened her eyes. The blinds had been drawn over her living room window, muting the otherwise too-bright morning light into something tolerable to alcohol-bleared eyes. And then a shadow crossed in front of the window, between her and the light, and as she cracked open gritty eyes she met a pair of blue eyes, quietly amused and sympathetic. "Good morning, Joss."

She groaned and let her head fall back onto the pillow. "Oh, no. Jesus, John. I am so sorry."

"Before you tell me what it is you're sorry for, how about waking up all the way first?" Those amused blue eyes again. "I made coffee. Strong, just how you like it."

Damn it, he even knew how she liked her coffee. She sighed and forced her eyes to open, all the way this time. She was on her couch, still dressed although her sneakers were off, and there was a…blanket?...over her. She frowned. "Wasn't this in my closet last night?"

"It was." More amusement. Was that a hint of a chuckle in that soft tenor? "Seemed to me it would do more good covering you than sitting in your closet."

Her heart jumped into her throat at the thought that he'd tucked her in. John Reese, badass extraordinaire, tucking a drunk Joss Carter in last night. She wished she'd been awake to enjoy it even as she felt a flush of humiliation that she'd lost control of herself like that. "Thank you," she managed as she levered herself up to a sitting position.

"None needed." And suddenly there was a cup of hot coffee in her hands, and she sipped gratefully just so she'd have something to look at other than the man sitting on the end of the couch. He'd made himself comfortable sometime during the night; his usual crisp white shirt and dark suit slacks lay neatly folded over the back of the easy chair across the living room, and he was wearing a white t-shirt and dark boxers. She flushed, and hurriedly ducked her head to hide it, pretending to take another sip of the coffee. _Has to be the alcohol still in my system,_ she reasoned. _Yeah. That's it. Has to be it._ Because she suddenly couldn't think of anything but the well-muscled legs extending out from under those boxers…

She hurriedly put the cup down and pushed the blanket he'd used to cover her aside. "I have to use the bathroom." She crossed the apartment to the bathroom, feeling his eyes on her as she went, and she was glad he couldn't see the blush on her face. Damn it, she was acting like a giddy little schoolgirl.

Half an hour later she emerged from the bathroom, washed, brushed and tidier than she'd been when she went in. A quick stop in her bedroom, where she shucked her comfortable clothes and started suiting up for her day at work—slacks, shirt, utility belt with pockets and pouches. She'd never gotten rid of her officer's uniform when she made detective about four years ago, and she guessed now it was a good thing; she'd also stayed in shape so she could still fit in it. Saved her from having to buy a new uniform when she was broken back down to officer.

And that reminded her of the night before. She hadn't drunk so much that she didn't remember what had happened; she never drank that much. The alcohol had simply managed to turn off her brain so she could say whatever she was thinking; and she had to fight a humiliated grimace as she remembered lashing out at John verbally, then crying all over him when they got back to her apartment. _He's got enough of his own problems, girl, you don't need to be getting all sloppy all over him and loading him down with your problems. You owe him an apology._ And even though she didn't really want to, she knew she had to.

John was dressed—more or less—by the time she got out of her bedroom. She'd heard him use the bathroom after she got done, and now he had his black slacks on over the white t-shirt. The white suit shirt, too, was on over his shoulders, though not buttoned, and he was still padding around in his socks. The scene was so hopelessly domestic, so at odds with the dangerous ferocity that she knew lay just under the civilized exterior, that she found herself smiling as she joined him in the kitchen, leaning up against the island. "I want a do-over of the morning. Get it started off right. Good morning, John."

His blue eyes laughed at her over the rim of his coffee cup. "Good morning, Joss."

She dropped her eyes to her cup, strapped a bit of steel to her spine, and said what she felt she had to say. "Um, thank you…for last night. And…I'm sorry."

He put his coffee cup down on the counter and leaned back against it, arms folded. "You said that when you first opened your eyes. So now that you're fully awake, you can clarify for me what it is you feel you have to apologize for."

Damn it, he knew what she was sorry for. Or was he really that thick? She sighed, leaned forward, elbows on the island, played with the handle of her coffee cup. "I'm sorry for making you drag me out of the bar last night. And I'm sorry for making you have to listen to my problems. I didn't have a right to burden you with my issues, I'm sure you have more than enough of your own to deal with. I had no right to just unload on you—" she stopped because he'd laid a finger on her lips, silencing her.

"You didn't make me do anything I didn't want to do, Joss," he said, so gently that she felt a lump rise in her throat. After the last week or so of dealing with the snubs and silent castigation at the precinct, it disarmed her completely to hear him sympathize. "I showed up at the bar because I wanted to. I tried calling you, but you didn't answer; I came and checked your apartment, but it was empty. When I looked at the calendar I saw it was Taylor's weekend with his father, so I figured you'd stopped at the corner bar, since you didn't take your car. And once I got there—"

She twitched her head out from under his hand, even though she could still felt his finger resting there. It took an effort not to lick that lower lip. "I lost my temper. I snapped at you. I wasn't mad at you, John, I was annoyed with a lot of things and it just…snowballed." She waved a hand helplessly, unable to think of any better way to explain her state of mind the previous night.

"I understand." He leaned his elbows on the island, fixing her with that intense blue gaze of his, and she paused, transfixed, unable to look away. "You don't need to explain, Joss. And you don't need to apologize. We're…friends…" had he paused just a moment before he said the word, as if uncertain it applied to them? "…and what are friends for if not to sympathize? I didn't do anything last night that I didn't want to do. You've never made me do anything I didn't want to do." A hint of a smile. "Finch has never made me do anything I really didn't want to do either."

The thought startled a laugh out of her. Finch might bankroll John—and their entire operation—but no, she really couldn't see Harold Finch being able to make John Reese do anything he didn't want to do. No one would make John Reese do anything he didn't want to do. Not for long. And they wouldn't walk away intact afterward.

As if her smile was what he'd been looking for, he relaxed, letting his gaze slide from her down to the island. "I picked up the papers around the apartment. Don't apologize for that either, I wanted to see that paperwork anyway."

"So what did you think?" she said, sliding the two file folders across the table toward her, her mind clicking into 'work' mode. "I swiped the folder on the second victim from Robinson's desk. Probably catch hell from him about it today, but I really don't give a damn." And even as she said it, she realized that no, she really didn't care what Robinson said or did. Why had she let him get under her skin last night?

"I agree with you, that the killer is likely military-trained. With medical knowledge. Everything is too precise, too careful. He may have used materials he found at the crime scene to make the cross he nailed those women to, but that doesn't make this any more spontaneous—or any less planned. I also think he harbors some grudge against women," John said thoughtfully.

"Ya think?" she said sarcastically, but he didn't rise to the bait, just leaned over and flipped to the picture of the lower stomach wounds on each of the victims.

"The cut starts here, and ends here," he said, pointing to the specific areas on the photos. "You're a woman, Joss, and you've had a child. Imagine that on a pregnant stomach. What does that remind you of?"

Her hand went involuntarily to her own stomach, her fingers tracing the path of the scar there. "A c-section." She looked up at him, astonished. "I had one. With Taylor. He was breech, they rushed me into emergency surgery, it was touch-and go there for a little while—for both of us." She stared at the pictures again. "How could I have missed that?"

It was on the tip of his tongue to be a smart-ass male (as Shaw described him) and tell Joss that that's why she kept him around, but he bit the words off as he absorbed the content of her statement. She'd had her son by c-section, and nearly died. It was a sobering thought; if she had died, he would never have known her—and his hand dropped involuntarily to his pocket, where the small, cold hard chunk of metal rested, its edges slowly wearing smooth from much handling. A bullet, with his name scratched on it by his own hand, kept from its intended destination by the woman standing in front of him. He'd seriously thought about ending it all; he'd hit rock bottom that night on the subway. But a chance meeting with a tough, sassy, but sympathetic detective that evening had changed the course of his life, and although he'd never told Joss about it, never even really admitted it to himself, the bullet he carried around in his pocket hadn't been his end, it had been his salvation. Irretrievably linked to Joss in his memory even though she'd never seen it (thank God she'd never seen it) and hopefully never would, when he was close to losing himself, frustrated and in despair, fingering the little bullet like a worrystone helped keep him balanced, focused, calm.

If she had died from that c-section, would he even still be alive? He doubted it. A small thing, one person's life among the billions on this planet, but the impact of that one life on all the others it touched, like Carter's on his, was infinitely precious. And he needed her in his life, although, given that she was still grieving over Cal Beecher, now was most likely not the right time to say it. He didn't know if there would ever be a right time; he didn't know if he would ever be able to say what he really felt to Joss…but he wanted to have the chance.

"I gotta talk to Robinson. To hell with whatever he might say to me. We gotta catch this guy before he kills someone else. Nothing else matters." She tossed her coffee back in one last gulp and put her mug in the sink. "Thanks John."

"You're welcome, Joss." He didn't say what he'd thought last night; that if he'd paid attention to her first case when she brought it to him, she might not be going through this now with the second, not at this point in time when she was still trying to adjust to being an officer. Instead, he buttoned his shirt as she gathered her purse and files and belongings, and was waiting by the apartment door when she was finally ready. He gestured. "After you, Detective."

"I'm not a detective anymore." He heard the defeat in her voice.

"Don't do that to yourself, Joss." His hand flashed out, held the apartment door closed, preventing her from opening it, and then he laid a hand on her shoulder, making it impossible for her not to look at him. "Don't let them take away everything you earned for yourself."

She stared at him, and he saw tears in her eyes. "But I'm not a detective anymore, John," she said, and he remembered what she'd said when she'd been crying in his arms last night.

"You're _still_ a detective, Joss Carter," he snapped fiercely, willing her to believe what he was saying, _needing_ her to believe it. "Just because some stuffed shirt decreed you have to wear a different uniform, that you be called something different, it doesn't mean that changes who you are. You're a detective because you earned it, and no one can take that away from you. They can change what they call you, but to your friends who know the truth, you are, and always will be, Detective Carter."

"Is that why you and Harold still call me 'Detective'?" A smile in her voice.

He released her, watched her wipe away a quick tear, then answered her. "Yes. It is. We don't care what the authorities say. They're all corrupt. They can't take away what you are, Joss. Only you can take that away from yourself." He pinned her with an intense gaze. "Do you feel like you're an Officer?"

"No," she admitted, taking a tissue from her purse and dabbing at her eyes, trying not to dislodge her eye makeup. "No. I don't."

"Then don't let them take that away from you."

She looked up at him, and he saw the light in her eyes that had first drawn him to her, the light that showed her fighting spirit—the light that had been absent when he looked at her last night. It was that same light that drew him, that was an integral part of her and how he saw her; the flame that he wanted to protect with everything that was in him, because if that ever went out permanently the world would be a darker, colder place without it. As he'd told Finch when her number came up the first time, there were some people the world couldn't afford to lose, and Joss Carter was one of them. "I won't. Thanks, John." And he heard the sincerity in her voice.

"Don't mention it. What are friends for?" and he busied himself fumbling with the lock on her door, because he'd been seized with a crazy, impulsive urge to kiss her. He fought it down, as he usually did, and by the time he had her apartment door open he'd been able to assume his usual expression. If she noticed it, or noticed anything about his internal struggle, she didn't say anything, and he closed her door, waited for her to lock it, then followed behind her—two steps back, and just slightly to her left, his usual flanking spot when they walked together. He had no idea why he walked there, it was just something he did.

She smiled brightly as she said goodbye, and he watched her get in her car and drive off to another day. Well, for right now, this worked, for both of them, but he was gradually starting to see her as more than a friend, and although he was positive that she couldn't see it now, still grieving for Cal Beecher, maybe, someday, she'd be able to see him as…something more?

And then he scoffed to himself as he headed for his car. She was a cop. He was…well, not a criminal, though he'd broken plenty of laws; he'd been on her radar for a while as a possible suspect. He was still a wanted man—he and Finch heard plenty of radio chatter among squad cars about the 'Man-in-the-suit'. Maybe someday when all of this craziness was over, maybe she could see him as something more; but for now, keeping them compartmentalized was a good idea.

Or as compartmentalized as he could keep it. Work with Harold and the numbers the Machine gave them used to be somewhat compartmentalized, but somewhere along the way it had gotten fuzzy; it hadn't hit him until the night Joss, Zoe and Sam had gone to a club as bait for a number that he'd realized just how entwined in his life she'd gotten. After that, no matter how he tried to keep them separate, somehow, someway, she was becoming more and more a part of his life. He was happy. And he was terrified—for what it could mean for her, since the women he liked didn't tend to live long.

But as he drove back to Harold's library, he thought about his determination yesterday to teach her some self-defense moves not taught by the military or any civilian police academy. There was an old gym among Harold's properties, and the apartment above it had briefly been one of John's possibilities when Harold offered him his choice of places to live—right before Harold had gifted him with his current residence, the Baxter Street apartment. Thinking about it now, it might not be bad—he and Carter could work out, then go to the lounge upstairs to unwind and clean up.

Yes, that could work very well indeed.


	4. Chapter 4: Video

**Chapter 4: Video**

"I must admit I share your puzzlement, Mr. Reese," Finch's voice was even more clipped and brief than usual—a sign he was thinking hard indeed.

Reese paced the library, unable to stay still. Yes, this wasn't one of the Machine's numbers, this was Carter's case, and he didn't really have to be involved—but something about this one disturbed him. Or rather, it disturbed Joss Carter deeply enough to disturb him. He just couldn't skim it like he had when she'd tentatively asked for his eyes on it two years ago; she was having a hard enough time right now, she didn't need a cold case from two years ago nipping at her heels. And because this _was_ now their concern. With Root's recent compromise of the Machine, was it possible it was making mistakes, slipping up, missing something? How could it have missed two victims of a serial killer—and the serial killer himself?

"So let's think back on what we do know." Shaw spoke from where she sat on the floor petting a happily-panting Bear.

Finch was staring into space, thinking. "The Machine gives us numbers of those who it believes are in danger. Premeditated danger. If these women simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it may not have been able to give us their numbers."

"So then why would it not have been able to give us the killer's number?" Frustration sharpened Reese's voice as he leaned over the table, fists clenched.

"Perhaps he doesn't live in an area where the Machine has eyes and can see him going about his business?" Shaw suggested, giving Bear one last pat and getting up to join the guys at Finch's computer desk. "There are some wooded, forested state parks within driving distance of Manhattan."

It made too much sense to Reese—and then Finch spoke in an uncanny echo to those thoughts. "He could be sitting in a wilderness cabin somewhere thinking and planning what he'll do to his next victim, until the itch to kill gets too strong and he has to scratch that itch. What better way to do it than to drive into the city, pick a random victim with whom he has no ties, no personal contact, no previous conflict? It would be a premeditated act, but one that would have, could have, no predictable victim."

"But wouldn't he have a computer, cell phone, some form of electronic contact to the outside world that you could tap, hack? Something that could give us a window into his activities, his world?" _There has to be something._ _For Carter's sake._ And for Reese's own, because this was driving him crazy.

"If he was a very paranoid person, or one of those anti-government survivalist types, then no, he wouldn't be so kind as to provide us with an entry," Finch was already typing into his computer. "However, let me see if there is a camera in or near the railyard that can catch any activity there…"

To Reese's absolute annoyance, the cameras at the railyard had been vandalized a while ago, and as it was abandoned, the city's transportation authority hadn't bothered to replace the one attached to the depot building or repair the one halfway up the derelict electric pole overlooking the yard itself. The best Finch could do was a traffic camera across the street at an intersection known to be a favorite deal spot for gangs and other lawless activity. And yes, there was the usual driving traffic; two drug deals, one that John rather suspected was the Russians, and he made a mental note to let Joss know. It might help her in her attempt to bring down HR.

But what caught all of their attentions was the black SUV that pulled into the yard just before midnight, half an hour after the Russians were gone. It disgorged a tall, dark figure, a massively-built male with forearms the size of most people's thighs. He was wearing a ski mask, which disgusted John to no end, but he was wearing a sleeveless shirt that displayed a number of tattoos on his arms from the shoulder of his sleeveless shirt down to his wrists. His hands were gauntleted in heavy black gloves.

Shaw made a disgusted sound. "Not very imaginative in his clothing choices."

"Sartorial elegance notwithstanding, Ms. Shaw, I rather think the lack of sleeves might have somewhat more to do with not being able to fit his arms into conventional sleeves than with personal choice," and Reese had to agree with Finch's dry assessment . It had been chilly the evening before, too chilly for a sleeveless shirt.

Then again, that enormous bear of a man probably didn't have too much of a problem keeping warm—sheer mass alone probably did the trick.

Reese, Finch, and Shaw watched him walk around the back of his SUV and open the rear door. They couldn't see what he was reaching in for, but it became obvious a few frames later when he pulled out a human figure.

Reese froze, watching intently. The camera wasn't in color, but even from here he could see the skin was dark. This was the victim then.

In anguished silence the three of them watched as the man selected two pieces of rough wood—railroad ties—and picked up a few of the nails lying around, using a nearby chunk of concrete to hammer the nails into the wood to form a crude cross. He dragged the woman, who was clearly unconscious, over to it and arranged her on top of it. She was fully clothed, but her jacket—a light jogging jacket, it looked like she'd been grabbed in the process of taking a midnight run—was wrapped around her head, with the arms tied in a knot over her eyes.

He arranged her limbs on the cross and then quietly started winding the rope in the chain hitch around the woman's arms. Reese watched, intent, at the way the hands moved with practiced ease in the complicated over-and-under patterning of the knots; knew, from a sneaked sidelong glance at Shaw, that she too knew what that meant. The clove hitch at each wrist was tied off with casual carelessness, then the man reached into his pocket and pulled out a long nail—it looked like a six-inch roofing nail—and delicately placed the point in the center of the woman's palm, then used the same rock to begin hammering the nail into the hand.

The woman roused to consciousness then; the sudden flailing of her legs, the only free portion of her body since the man was straddling her torso, was unmistakable. John heard a sharp intake of breath from Shaw; he sneaked a peek at her, to see if she was disgusted, repulsed, or sickened at the action, but her expression was unreadable as she focused on the screen. Harold, on the other side of John, was much more affected; he was visibly shaken, and the pallor of his skin showed he wasn't immune to the horror of what this woman must have been feeling, these last few moments of her life. And John Reese realized something, in that moment, that he hadn't considered before; how hard must it have been for Harold Finch, sitting here in his lonely library, looking at the people behind the Machine's numbers dying before his eyes and being absolutely helpless to stop it? To see the evil that could be done to another human being, on a daily basis, but be completely unable to do anything about it? For the first time he understood the desperation that had led lonely, reclusive Harold Finch to recruit a dangerous man like John Reese.

The man on the screen finished with the woman's other hand, but he didn't get up. He remained straddling the woman's thrashing body for a moment, then stripped off that sleeveless vest, leaving his torso bare. Reese barely had time to notice that the torso was heavily tattooed all over, as well, before the heavy fists rose and descended on the jacket-wrapped head.

A right-handed punch snapped the woman's head to the left; then a left-handed punch sent her head careening to the right. Then left. Then right. Then left again. Reese forced himself not to think about what the woman must be feeling at the moment, what she was thinking and experiencing; he was studying every movement the man made, looking for weaknesses, any flaws in the way the man moved. He was equally adept at punching with both left and right, didn't seem to have any physical flaws in his movement that would indicate old injuries. Neither side was dominant, either.

There was no audio, but no one in the library watching the footage on the traffic camera had any problem with imagining the woman's choked screaming. After the first few blows she would have become dizzy, disoriented; as the beating progressed they saw her chest and torso heaving as the agony of the assault made additional intake of air necessary; air that was denied her because of the gag and the jacket tied around her head. Then the man drove a fist into her stomach, and that triggered the heaves; she choked and retched, and John could imagine the frantic struggle her body was making as she aspirated her own stomach acid. By the time the woman stopped thrashing—not dead yet, but certainly unconscious and close to it—Reese's face was a cold, hard unreadable mask as the man pulled two more nails and a large hunting knife from a pocket of the sleeveless vest.

The knife cutting up the inside of the woman's exercise pants didn't elicit a response; neither did cutting off her panties, or cutting the shirt right up the middle of her torso. A feeble movement as he sliced through the front of the woman's bra, laying her chest bare; and Shaw made a single disgusted sound as they saw the man punch the woman's chest a few times. Hard. It seemed to wake the woman up, there was a bit of renewed struggling, which escalated as the knife in the man's hand flashed up, then down, and suddenly there was a spreading pool of blood across the woman's belly, between her hips, as he slashed her lower stomach open. She convulsed for a moment, then the agony of what she was experiencing finally drove her into unconsciousness, Reese hoped for the last time. The killer, apparently deciding to go on with his preparations, grabbed her left foot and turned the leg outward, then used the rock and nails to nail her foot, sole-down, to the cross; then the other. In this position, with the knees bent outward, her lower torso was on obscene display, but she had stopped struggling by then. Dying. And then the final indignity; a small square plastic packet from out of his pocket, opened carefully, and then a zipper being pulled down…

Shaw turned away, but Reese saw her hands clenching and unclenching, as if around the handle of a knife; he could well imagine what Shaw would think of to do to the anatomy on this particular male. Harold pushed his chair away from the table, moving urgently in that jerky way of his, to the bathroom, and moments later Reese heard him getting sick. Fortunately, he himself wasn't feeling the urge to vomit; he was, however, definitely feeling the urge to kill the bastard they had just watched. Carter was right; they had to find out who Ski Mask really was and take him out, because Reese knew he wouldn't stop until someone stopped him. And he had to be off-the-grid—no one who killed like this would have gone unnoticed by the Machine for this long. Finch had told Reese once that the Machine was never wrong, so this was the only possible explanation—the guy had to be completely off-grid.

He reached out, hit the button that would freeze the video, and stared intently at the man who was now carefully packing up, having rolled the trash in the panties of the victim he'd just murdered. Because she was now dead; there was a certain laxness in the way the knees splayed, and the fact that the blood pool between the woman's hip bones was no longer getting larger. The heart had stopped beating. "Who are you?" he wondered aloud, his steely gaze fixed on the ski-masked face. "Tell me who you are." Left unsaid were the words _so I can hunt you down and kill you_.

"I get him first." Shaw's voice was harsher than usual. "I call dibs on him first. You can have whatever's left after I'm done." She had a knife in her hand, Reese couldn't imagine where she'd been hiding it on her person, and she was sitting coolly back in her chair cleaning out underneath her nails with the tip. Now she stabbed the air in the direction of the monitor. "No human court would ever give a good enough sentence to satisfy justice for _that_."

"As much as I abhor taking a human life, I find I am inclined to agree with Ms. Shaw in this case," Finch said, returning to his chair with a small glass of water, which he was apparently sipping in an attempt to clear his mouth of the bad taste of stomach acid. "I find it difficult to append the word 'human' to the monster we just saw. I rather hope Detective Carter will not run across this man in the course of her investigation. She will try to take him alive, and after seeing what he just did, I don't believe he deserves to live." He put the glass on the table next to the computer, and sat down. "Let's see if we can figure out who he is."

As the sound of clicking computer keys filled the library, Shaw looked at John. "Didn't Detective Carter get broken back to Officer recently?"

"Yes, she was," Harold and John chorused together.

"So shouldn't we call her 'Officer'?"

"No." Both also at the same time. But it was Harold who turned to Shaw first, and there was a steely glint in his eyes that John rarely saw but that reminded him that Harold was Joss's friend too. "Ms. Shaw, the fact that some corrupt cops decided on a different sequence of letters as her rank does not erase who and what she is. She is a Detective, and nothing will change that. As her friend, I choose to acknowledge and respect that." Tight-lipped, he returned to his computer. "You may do whatever you like."

Shaw was silent for a moment, and despite the grimness of the situation, John had to hide a smile. He knew what Shaw thought of Harold, and he rather had a feeling that her opinion of him might have undergone a slight rearrangement in the last few minutes. And when she finally spoke again, it confirmed his guess. "Does Detective Carter know this footage exists? Has she seen it?"

"The Detective who is currently handling the case, a Detective Robinson, isn't too kindly disposed to her, and I rather get the feeling he wouldn't feel it necessary to share details with her. What he does or does not do is no concern of ours. She is our colleague and our friend and she has earned the right to know what we know about the case." Finch's words were still cold and clipped. "It was, after all, her case to begin with. And it is her determination to get this killer now that will fuel the investigation—not Robinson."

The license plates on the SUV were too caked with mud to read the numbers—in fact, the whole bottom half of the vehicle was heavily caked, and it was hard to tell if it was deliberate or accidental. Finally Finch made a little sound of frustration and took a screenshot of the ski-masked face, isolating it and setting another program to work on the cropped section. "I'll have facial recognition software try to extrapolate details of the face from the shadows and creases on that mask. In the meantime, let's see if we can find the footage from the 2011 case."

The last victim had turned up when they'd only known Joss for about a year, and there had been rather clearer definitions then, a clearer separation between Joss's work and theirs. Over the last couple of years as they went from acquaintances to friends to a solid working team, that boundary had gotten blurrier and blurrier until now it was all enmeshed; her problems were theirs, theirs were hers.

"Finch, didn't you once say that you have an old gym on the lower East side? I'd been thinking lately that I'd like to have somewhere to meet Carter and teach her some hand-to-hand self-defense moves not found in military or law enforcement training manuals." He kept his eyes on the back of Finch's neck, trying to avoid meeting Shaw's eyes—and sharp glare. For someone who swore she herself had no emotions, she sure was good at picking up on other peoples' emotions.

"An excellent idea, Mr. Reese. I will say that I had thought of that myself and I have been quietly having various items of equipment delivered there. When you or Detective Carter have stress to work off, it might be healthier to work that off in physical activity than drowning it in the bottom of a bottle. I certainly would find it infinitely preferable." He turned dark eyes on Shaw. "Ms. Shaw is also welcome to use the gym—not that I could stop her, as she has a predictable penchant for turning up where she is neither wanted nor invited. And I suppose I should extend the invitation to Ms. Morgan as well, as she and Joss are also friends."

"Love you too, Finch," Shaw grinned as the knife she'd been using on her nails disappeared back to wherever it had come from. "Just remember I get first crack at that bastard." She stabbed a finger in the direction of the computer monitor. "I'll even waive my usual fee just for the pleasure of snapping that bastard's neck. After I cut him down to size, of course." And with a last, meaningful look, she vanished.


	5. Chapter 5: Workout

**Chapter 5: Workout**

He waited for her outside the precinct, watched her come out the door through his rear view mirror, trying to gauge her mood. Not as bad as it had been yesterday, he decided finally, although there was a certain slump to her shoulders that told him that things at work were no better than they had been the day before.

But tonight he had a surprise for her. When he'd left Finch at the library, still working on still shots from the surveillance camera video (they hadn't been able to find any remaining video of the railyard from the Murray victim two years previous) Harold had given him the keys to the gym.

It had proved to be exactly what he'd imagined he'd need. Floor space covered with mats, a couple of punching bags and spare pairs of boxing gloves along with the safety equipment and padding that went with it; three treadmills that made John smile as he imagined Zoe, Sam, and Joss jogging side by side on it; a couple of exercise bikes, some weights. Two small locker rooms, one labeled 'men' and one labeled 'women', took up the rest of the space on the ground floor. A flight of stairs to one side of the gym led to a small loft space with a TV, DVD player, gaming system, refrigerator, small kitchenette, and sturdy wooden coffee table in front of a generous sofa with worn but (when he sat on it to test it out, comfortable) cushions. It was, all things considered, a perfect 'rec room' for their little vigilante team.

Another flight of stairs led up to the third floor of the gym, which was where John had originally considered setting up his apartment. There was just enough space here for him to have a small bed, kitchen and sink, bathroom, a small chair and table. When he'd first considered it, he'd described how he'd thought it should look to Harold; but apparently what he'd told Harold and what Harold had actually heard were two different things.

Not that John hadn't liked the Baxter Street apartment the first time he stuck his key in the door and walked in; he just hadn't expected the _size_ of it. It certainly didn't fit his definition of an 'efficiency' apartment—small, everything in one room, functional and efficient; a shoebox in a larger concrete box of an apartment building. The Baxter apartment's high lofty ceiling gave an impression of air and space; the almost floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls let in lots of light almost all day, adding to the impression of space; but there were no knickknacks and useless bric-a-brac to clutter the place, no walls behind which an intruder could hide. Functional and efficient.

Although…there had lately been some nights when he'd considered getting some heavier curtains, and maybe a folding wall partition giving the bed some semblance of privacy if he ever wanted to bring a woman over. One particular woman, in fact. He couldn't even explain to himself why it would be ok to bring Zoe Morgan to this apartment, this bed, and indulge their desires with no thought to privacy or who might be able to see them through the thin translucent stuff in the windows, and yet the thought of having Joss here in that bed with no proper curtains in the windows made him cringe. With Zoe, while he considered her a friend, his relationship with her was definitely a 'friends with benefits' type of relationship, and yet when his traitorous mind thought of Joss, it wasn't in the same category as his arrangement with Zoe. Not even close. And since Joss had started occupying more of his thoughts, his arrangement with Zoe was getting a bit more distant.

Not that he allowed himself to think too hard about Joss. No thinking of her while in public, certainly not about her in that setting. Male anatomy could be so inconvenient sometimes. The night he and Harold had invited Shaw, Morgan and Carter to go out to Blur as bait for Ian Murphy, he'd been all too aware of what the outfit Carter had been wearing—a burgundy leather dress he'd privately started thinking of as 'THAT dress'—was doing to his anatomy and he'd had to focus on something else, rather hurriedly. Shaw, clearly uneasy in her little black dress, had made a convenient target, and he half-suspected that his sniping at her that evening had told her what she wanted to know about how he viewed Joss Carter.

He sternly ordered his mind away from that train of thought after locking up the gym and adding the key to the ring in his pocket. Strange, to think that four years ago he hadn't had anything to put in a pocket; now he had keys. And they were keys to places that he'd grown attached to—the Baxter Street apartment, the Library, now the gym—and, in a back pocket, a key to Joss's apartment that no one but he and Joss knew the existence of.

The first time she'd been in a mood and refused to let him in, he'd simply picked the lock and invited himself in. Despite her lecture to him on boundaries, after the second time he'd done that she'd quietly handed him a key one day, jokingly declaring that she was not going to be responsible for having to explain to her landlord why a lockpick had broken off in the lock. But he'd understood, and been touched; at the trust that represented, the fact that her trust was doubly precious since her son could be in there. Trust was complicated.

And Joss Carter was a complicated woman.

Now he shadowed her through the streets as she drove back to her apartment from the precinct. Manhattan South Homicide was on East 21st, and her apartment had apparently been chosen with that convenience in mind; she was only ten blocks away from the station.

They were only about four blocks from her building, at a standstill in traffic, when his phone rang; a quick peek at the caller ID as he answered it brought a smile to his face, and he answered the call. "Feeling better today, are we, Detective Carter?" Having found out this morning just how much she'd missed it, he would now take every chance he got to remind her that her true friends, he and Harold (and now Sam, after their conversation that afternoon) were never going to forget what and who she really was.

And she was feeling better; he could hear the hint of laughter in her voice as she said cheerfully, "I thought I spotted you when I left the precinct. That you, about half a block back?"

"Guilty." He was still driving the purple GTO convertible he'd stolen from Hector Alvarez; it was rather distinctive, and he knew it, but he couldn't help but love the way the car felt under his hand.

A softer note in her voice, then. "John. I'm feeling better tonight. I can't even explain why I let Robinson get under my skin last night. You don't have to check up on me."

"I know. But it's still early, and Harold had a surprise for me this afternoon that I wanted to share with you this evening. I know this is Taylor's weekend with his father, and it's Saturday night, and you're off tomorrow. So I figured you might be up a little later tonight." A pause. "You did say, once, that you wished we'd call you for something that didn't involve guns."

"A surprise? Harold has a surprise? For us? And I don't have to bring my gun?" A laugh. "Okay, then I guess I'm game."

"Good. Then when you get home, slip into something comfortable, something you can move quickly in, and I'll wait outside." And suddenly he regretted not having brought his motorcycle—he would have loved zipping along city streets with her arms wrapped around his middle, her hair blowing in the wind.

"Oh-kay." He could hear the puzzled anticipation in her voice, and smiled to himself.

Half an hour later, she was pulling open the passenger door, peeking in. "Do I look comfortable enough for you?"

He looked her up and down, appreciatively. She was curvy in all the right places. Not as small and wiry as Sam, not as lean and leggy as Zoe, and he couldn't see her winning any bikini contests, but that wasn't what attracted him to her. Her spirit, her heart, her light, was irresistible to him, and that was why he was going to do this, teach her what she needed to know to protect that light. And her clothes—knit yoga pants, a gray tank top under an old NYPD Academy zippered hoodie, and running shoes that had seen better days but would be comfortable—were perfect. She'd taken off her makeup too. "You look great. Hop in."

She did, looking him up and down as soon as she buckled her seatbelt. "You look great too. Now I suspect this surprise is gonna make me work up a sweat." He didn't miss her glance up and down his frame; track pants, running shoes, a comfortable t-shirt that he was nevertheless planning on taking off once he'd worked up enough of a sweat that would make him hard to hold. He wanted to teach her how to be ready for anything. If a guy the size of the man-mountain that had killed the woman in the railyard ever came after her, he wanted—no, _needed_—her to know how to hold the guy off just long enough for him to get to her, and her gun might not always be handy—or a deterrent.

She frowned when they pulled up outside the Washington Street gym. He understood; when he'd pulled up in front of the gym this afternoon, he too had thought it unprepossessing, just another nondescript building in a district with other nondescript buildings. But she withheld comment as he led her around the side of the building, unlocked the door, and held it open for her to walk in.

The lights on the gym floor were on motion sensors, and they came on as she stepped in. He had to smile in pure pleasure at the huge grin that dawned on her face. "John. This is…this is great!" She was practically beaming as she turned to him. "Just what we needed!"

"We?"

She turned suddenly bashful, dropping her eyes to the floor. "Well, I was kind of thinking that I'd like you to teach me some of those moves you know. I'm good—I'm better than a lot of the guys in the Department—but I'm not as good as Zoe or Sam, and definitely not as good as you. I was kinda hoping…" and she peeked up at him from under a strand of hair that had fallen over her right eye.

"Harold and I were thinking the exact same thing. This gym is open to you, me, and Harold even graciously extended the invitation to Zoe and Sam." Her eyes lit up in glee, and he groaned silently at the thought of the gym being taken over by three women.

But she looked too happy for him to really care. "I'd been thinking for a while that there were a few things I could show you that would help."

"Not that I really get into fistfights with people all that often," she said as she looked around the gym, "But I could use some lessons."

"There's a lounge upstairs if you want to drop off your purse. Come on down when you're ready." He gestured to the stairs, and watched her cross the intervening space with nimble, graceful steps, take the shallow flight two steps at a time, and fly up. Moments later she was down, already bundling her hair into a ponytail at the nape of her neck.

He insisted that they stretch out and warm up first; there was a box with jump ropes, and he had to try and ignore the way her chest bounced around as she jumped. Apparently oblivious to the effect she was having on him, she warmed up, and by the time they were ready to face each other on the mat, her shoulders had lost the tension in the muscles and her movement was loose-limbed and relaxed.

He started out slow, tentative; he had seen her manhandling perps but had never seen her in an out-and-out fistfight, and he didn't know how much of her military hand-to-hand she still remembered. So he watched her carefully, seeing what she moved confidently in, what she looked hesitant in, and giving her tips. "Keep your hands up. Forearms up, fists ready. Keep your eyes constantly moving, look your opponent in the eyes, pay attention to movements of shoulders, arms, legs, hips, look for those subtle shifts in balance that say your opponent is getting ready to make a move." He exaggerated some of his own movements so she could get used to seeing what she should be looking for, then gradually toned down his movements until the barest twitch of his shoulder drew her eyes—and her defense—to that hand. "Good."

She ended up flat on the mat more times than he could count in the next few hours, but by the end of their session, he found himself actually having to work at getting past her defenses to get her on the ground, and her muscles had 'remembered' a lot of the things she'd been taught in the Army. He was gratified by her progress by the time he called a halt to their training session. "Very good for a first time," he complimented her as he stepped closer to give her a hand up off the mat.

For answer, she grabbed his arm, tucked her body around it, and rolled. Caught by surprise, he only managed to fold his legs in a graceless tumble that took him down onto the mat with her before her falling body weight twisted his arm out of its socket, and he ended up flat on his back on the mat, with her straddling him, breathing hard. "Just trying to show you I do listen," she teased. "You've been trying to teach me how to do this all evening. And you did tell me to be unpredictable."

"I did." In one smooth move, he turned the tables, and a second later she was on her back on the mat—again—and he was straddling her. "You did catch me by surprise, Detective, but you forgot to finish the kill."

His face was barely inches from hers, and she was suddenly well aware of his hard, sweaty male body pinning hers down. He'd taken his shirt off sometime in the middle of their workout, revealing all those gorgeous male muscles of his. There were scars here and there on his skin, souvenirs of war, of battle, of countless fights and scuffles, and she had to resist the urge to let her fingers trace each one, resist the urge to kiss each one of those 'boo-boos' and make it all better…

"Oh will you two get a room!?" came an exasperated huff, and both Joss and John looked toward the gym door in surprise. Sam leaned against the doorframe, half in shadow, but the sardonic smirk on her face told them she'd been there for long enough to draw her own conclusions from what she was seeing. "As if seeing the two of you isn't raising the temperature in here already." She rolled her eyes, a very Shaw-like, elegant display of sarcastic disbelief, and was gone, letting the gym door slam behind her.

John looked at Joss. She looked back. Then, as one, they both exploded in laughter.

"It's a good thing…I'm already on the mat…or I would be hitting the floor right now," Joss gasped as she finally pushed herself up to a sitting position on the floor. "She says some of the damndest things."

"She's very blunt," John agreed, still chuckling. He hadn't laughed like that in…a long time. "Okay, I think that's it. Truce, now." He gave her a hand up. "I think there's water in the refrigerator in the lounge."

Bottles of water in hand, they wandered through the gym, looking at the treadmills, exercise bikes, weight bench and weights, boxing equipment. Joss sighed happily. "It's a perfect little rec room. I really like it. Have to remember to thank Harold." Her gaze traveled upward to the lounge, then further up. "What's up there?"

He led her to the shallow steps and followed her up to the little loft space. "We girls could probably turn this into a nice little yoga studio," she said, then amended, "Okay, Zoe and me. Sam doesn't strike me as a yoga aficionado." They shared grins, remembering Shaw's objection to the dating profile Finch had created for 'Nadiya' before going to Blur a little while back.

"Okay, so let's cut to the chase. What did you find out about the killer? Any progress on that today?" She asked as they descended from the loft to the rec level, and settled onto the couch, she shrugging back into her hoodie, he pulling his t-shirt over his head.

"There was a surveillance camera across the street that caught the entire murder. It's pretty bad, Carter. Shaw saw it—and she said she'd waive her usual fee just for the pleasure of snapping the killer's neck. After she cut him down to size, of course."

Carter grinned. "Sounds like her. She would say that." She sobered. "I'd like to see it. Robinson said he couldn't find any surveillance footage, but I figured if anyone could find something, you guys could."

"We did." Reese flipped open a laptop on the coffee table and plugged a flashdrive. "I'll warn you, it is pretty graphic. Finch got sick."

"I can handle it. I'm a big girl. I've been doing this longer than you have, _Mister _Reese."


	6. Chapter 6: Give

**Chapter 6: Give…**

_Author's Note: So, another pair of chapters that simply have to be read together. Also, since I finally got John and Joss in bed in Chapter 30 this week, and then spent Christmas day writing a chapter where Shaw tortured information about HR out of a pedophile, I figured I have time to post a double chapter. See, when I write, often a later chapter will get me to think of supporting details that should have been mentioned in an earlier chapter and I go back to change it, so for this reason I don't usually start posting a story until it's almost done—or, as in the case with my novels, each part of the novel has to be done before I start posting chapters from that section. This novel's been a little different; John and Joss wouldn't leave me alone, so Chapter 1 of Catalyst was posted while I was writing chapter 5; now I'm done with the first half of Catalyst and I'm six chapters deep into part 2, HR's takedown. _

_I look back at what I've written thus far—I'll hit 200 pages today—and yes, it has indeed been a wild ride thus far. Thanks go out to SWWoman , kaydimz, Lisa81, and wolfmusic for the insightful responses to review replies; and for all the reviewers, you guys are great. Take a peek at the M-rated section of POI, I left you guys a little Christmas/thank-you present—a Reese/Carter song-and-smut-fic titled 'Serenade' that's sort of a companion piece for the upcoming chapter 30_. _You're just sorta getting it a little early._ _Enjoy!_

For long moments after the flash drive stopped playing, there was silence in the tiny loft space. They hadn't moved for so long the lights had gone out. Then, very softly, out of the darkness, Reese heard Joss Carter's voice. "That scum-sucking son of a bitch."

He was silent. He couldn't help but agree with her assessment.

"I want this guy, John. I want this guy as bad as I want HR." She shifted position on the couch, and the lights came on—and he saw that fierce glint in her eye. "If I don't stop him, he'll keep killing. He'll keep killing until someone stops him."

"'We', Joss. We'll stop him."

She crushed the now-empty flimsy plastic water bottle in her fist. "I hadn't yet had a chance to tell you, Captain assigned me to Robinson until the killer's caught. The woman who was killed was the daughter of some private business owner who happens to be a friend of the Senator, so the higher-ups are breathing on the cops to get this solved in a hurry. Cap told Robinson since I caught the first case two years ago, we'll solve this faster if we pool our knowledge."

John tossed back the last of his water. "Guess Robinson wasn't too happy about that."

Carter grinned with malicious enjoyment. "You guessed right. Not that I care. It's more important that we catch this killer before he strikes again. Our petty little feud doesn't matter." Once again she surprised him with the depth of her selflessness and her ability to look past herself to see the big picture. "I still don't know why I let him get under my skin like that last night. Won't happen again, I promise you that."

"Don't make promises you can't keep," John said quietly. "You're human, Joss, and other people will still get to you. Just remember that we're your friends, and we understand. We're certainly not going to get upset with you because you're upset." Although, maybe Robinson could benefit from a visit by the Man-in-the-suit…

She must have read his mind. "Oh no," Carter said with a laugh, shaking her head. "Robinson is not going to get a visit from Reese, John."

"Why not?" he said, giving her a look of round-eyed innocence. "It wouldn't hurt for him to remember that you've been at this for longer than he has."

"John, I'm a big girl. I can handle it. Okay, maybe it didn't look like it last night, but I swear, he's not going to get me down again."

Quiet for a time, both of them sitting in companionable silence. It was John who broke the silence first, reaching under the coffee table for the bag he'd placed there when he'd checked the gym earlier in the evening. "Got something for you," he said as he handed her a plain cardboard box.

"What is it?" Her eyes lit up as she inspected it critically, then looked at him with a raised eyebrow. "It's not going to blow up when I open it, is it? Fusco gave me a box this morning with a popper in it. I damn near shot the thing."

"Would I do that to you?" He feigned innocence, but his smile was warm. "What did Fusco give you?"

"A new holster for my gun. For my birthday, he said."

"Then consider this your birthday gift, then." He hadn't known it was her birthday—he'd get on Harold later about not telling him. Was this why Harold had chosen tonight to give him keys to the gym? "Go on, open it."

She opened the box—and her whole face lit up in pleased surprise. "John!"

"I remembered you liked Shaw's. I got you one of your own."

The box went in her lap as her hands took the Beretta Nano handgun from its foam bed. The small, snub-nosed 9 mil fitted into her hand perfectly, and he could tell she loved it. She ejected the clip, looked at it, then slipped it back in, grinning at the solid click. "I love it. Best present I ever got." Then she said, "But if I try to get this registered, it's not going to have a body count on it, is it? It's not one that you picked up along your…travels?"

He could tell from her tone that she was joking, but he answered her seriously anyway. "No. No body count. This was legally purchased." He'd never give her a gun with heat on it. But she was a cop, and she knew what line of work he was really in, and while she trusted them, it was still a testament to her cop instincts that she asked.

"From a law enforcement standpoint, though, you could get in a lot of trouble for this. Not supposed to buy guns with the intent to give them to someone else, John, it's called a straw purchase."

"It's illegal because most of the time you don't know what the person you're giving it to is going to do with it. But I know what you're going to do with this one. So this purchase isn't illegal." Damn the man, he had a way of making even the simplest black-and-white issues appear in shades of gray. "Just…try not to shoot Robinson with it, okay? Could get a little messy."

Her laughter filled the gym, and then she leaned over and gave him a hug and a quick kiss on the cheek. It took every ounce of his self-control not to turn his head at the last second so his lips met hers.

He drove her back to her apartment, debating all the way about whether he should walk her in. It hadn't escaped his notice that a picture of Cal Beecher now sat beside the framed photo of Joss and her son on the mantelpiece of the faux fireplace at her apartment. At one time, the building had been a complete house, now it was cut into two separate apartments. Joss had the ground floor; the top floor of the two-story old brownstone now belonged to someone else, and John had more than once thought about asking Harold to buy the building and turn the upstairs tenant out so that Joss could have the house to herself. But she never complained about the living arrangement, and he was absolutely positive that she'd get very upset at John and Harold crossing this boundary of her life, so he figured he'd leave well enough alone.

Still, there was a warm hominess to her apartment that was a direct contrast to the efficient sterility of his own Baxter street apartment—little changed from the day that he'd opened the door that first time. But he'd really been reluctant to endure the miserable task of shopping for stuff for his apartment, and he would have no idea what to buy anyway. The last time Zoe had been over she'd made tentative suggestions, but nothing she said sounded appealing and he'd replied rather frostily that he liked his apartment the way it was. Whereupon Zoe had stopped talking about it.

And that had been nearly a year ago. She hadn't been back since, even though she'd hinted a couple times that she was open to the idea of him inviting her back over—he hadn't invited her back, and she, with rather more tact and delicacy than Sam displayed, had never invited herself over. But more and more John was starting to wonder if Joss might have some more palatable ideas for decoration—starting with needing to get curtains.

"You know, I've never seen your place," she said, in a startling, uncanny echo of his own thoughts. "When I first met you, you were a mess, living on the streets. I know you have to have a place of your own now." He could almost hear the end of her sentence, even though she didn't say it aloud. _Harold wouldn't let you keep living on the streets._

"I do," he said thoughtfully as they sat at a light waiting for it to turn green. "Harold gave me the key for my birthday two years ago—and then forgot to put the card with the address into the key box so I'd know what lock the key fitted into."

She giggled. He liked that sound. "Your birthday, hmm? So when is your birthday?"

He flashed her a challenging smile. "You're the detective, you tell me."

"Oh, I'll find out." Damn, he loved that mischievously wicked smile she got sometimes; made her look younger, and the light in her soul was so much closer to the surface when she smiled like that. "So what's it like? Knowing you, efficiency, bed, table, just the basic essentials, not much else."

He smiled at her again. "You could say that."

"I also think you're like every other man I know, hates shopping. You probably haven't gotten much for it, there's probably stuff you need but you can't stand the thought of shopping."

He grinned at her. "See why we never stopped calling you 'detective'?"

She grinned at him even as her phone buzzed, and she started fishing around in her purse for it. "You know, you could always get Zoe Morgan to help you shop. I'm sure she'd have some ideas." He shot her a sharp glance, but she was busy digging in her purse and didn't see his look—or she was deliberately ignoring him.

"She'd have ideas. I'm just not sure I'd like them. I've seen her taste in decorating. Nothing like yours." Yeah, he was positive he didn't like them, but he wasn't about to tell Joss that, and he also cursed the slightly wistful note in his voice—hoping she hadn't heard it, hadn't picked up on it. The idea of Joss decorating his apartment held some appeal for him-deep reds, warm browns, earth tones, like she had at her apartment.

"Oh." Apparently she hadn't heard him; she was frowning at the screen on her phone. "Something's come up. Paul says he's bringing Taylor home tonight, and he'll make up the extra day when he can."

"Well, let's get you home then," he said.

Although he'd told himself he wouldn't do it, he did walk Joss up to her door when they pulled up outside her apartment. "So…hey, forgot this," he said, and fished around in his pocket for the extra key Harold had made for the gym. "Goes to the gym. Door's always open for you. Just remember you might see Zoe, Shaw, me or Finch there." Their hands touched briefly as she took the key from him, and electricity jolted through him. He had to force himself not to maintain that touch longer than was strictly necessary.

"Thanks, John," and he knew she wasn't just talking about the gym, the self-defense lesson, the Nano, or even the security camera footage; it was everything.

"You're welcome." Inadequate, but then again, some things were just understood and words weren't necessary. She turned then, and he waited until she got her door open before turning and heading down the steps toward his car. Just before he opened the door and got in, he looked back up, impulsively. The edge of one of the drapes in her front window was pulled back, and she was watching him leave. When she realized he'd seen her, she gave him a small wave, and a smile, and the warm glow of that smile stayed with him as he pulled out.

"You look suspiciously cheerful," Zoe drawled when he walked through the front door of the gym the next morning. "Who did you have to murder to get that happy?"

"Nice to see you too, Zoe," he said with a sardonic smirk as he headed up the flight of steps to the upstairs lounge. It hadn't hit him until he'd gotten home the previous night that Joss had left the new Nano he'd given her at the gym, and he was just stopping by to pick it up with the intent of dropping it off at her place. What he hadn't counted on was word on the female grapevine spreading so quickly that Zoe heard about it—and, just past Zoe's shoulder, he saw Sam on a treadmill with earphones in. Both women were dressed in workout clothes, and he was irresistibly reminded of Joss, here last night, sweaty and panting while pinned under him. He'd dreamed about that last night…

He forced his thoughts away from that train of thought. "Good morning to you too, Sam," he said, and continued on his way up the steps. And at the top of the steps, he got another surprise. Bear lounged on the couch, tail tip gently waving. As soon as he saw John, his jaw dropped in a happy doggy smile.

"Hey, Bear," John ruffled the dog's fur, smiling. "How're you doing today?"

"Sam stopped by the library. Harold's busy with something, and Sam offered to take Bear for a walk. After she got outside she decided she wanted to check out the gym and she called me. We both arrived at about the same time." Zoe grinned. "It's a nice place."

"It serves its purpose." But he was damned if he was going to let the girls turn it into a girls' only clubhouse.

As if on cue, he heard the door of the gym open downstairs, and then heard Joss's cheerful greeting. "Good morning, Sam."

"Hey, Joss." Friendly but brisk; apparently Sam wasn't going to bring up what she'd seen last night, although John was pretty sure he'd hear an earful from her later. "Who's this?"

"Taylor. My son. We're just stopping to pick up something I left here last night."

Moments later Joss was standing at the entrance to the loft, Taylor standing beside her, and Sam coming up behind her. "Good morning John. Hey, did you see my—oh there it is."

He handed the box to her, and Sam grinned as she saw it. "So you finally got one of your own, hmm?"

"Yeah, I did." Joss carefully didn't mention where she'd gotten it, a measure of tact that John appreciated since Zoe was looking at him rather sharply indeed. He suspected that she knew where the gun had come from, but really, he didn't care what she thought. The look on Joss's face last night when she opened it was well worth Zoe's snubs. "I love this thing."

"Yeah, I love mine too. Do you know they deliberately designed it to be snag-free when you pull it out, that's why it's so smooth…"

John tuned the girls out as he crossed the loft to talk to Taylor, who had gone right to the gaming system. "Oh, wow, how'd you guys score one of these, there's a waiting list for this new system!" The boy was sorting through games. "And you have the new Call of Duty for it too!"

Since the girls were chattering happily in their corner of the loft, John reached over and switched the system on. "Want to give it a try?"

"Sure!" the boy was all eagerness.

He wasn't much of a gamer, and hadn't really understood the allure of gaming, but Taylor was all too happy to explain the principles of the game and soon he and John were deep in it. "Look out, there's one of the enemy off to your left, look, look, all the way over, hiding behind that car…"

"I see him," John said, keeping his gaze on the screen and scanning the landscape for more of the 'enemy' even as he worked the controls to aim and fire, taking the enemy out. It was a bit trickier than actually using a gun, but he could get used to this. "It's called 'someone on your nine'," he explained to the boy, using terms he was familiar with. "In the military, the cardinal points around you are twelve, three, six, and nine. If someone's coming at you from the left, that's 'coming up on your nine.' From behind—whoa, look behind you, there's someone on your six…"

"Aww, man!" Taylor threw up his hands in exasperation as he 'died', the screen on his side of the controller turning red. "Okay, gotta remember that."

"Want another game?" John found himself rather amused—he'd never seen himself as the gaming type, but this was…fun. And Taylor was definitely enjoying himself. Joss, Sam and Zoe had disappeared downstairs to the gym, and he heard their voices, so he sighed and resigned himself to playing babysitter. Not that he was all that upset about it…and Bear was splitting his time watching the screen and the two humans. John absently made a mental note to buy a dog bed for the big dog, then refocused his attention on the game.

By the time Joss came to collect Taylor (reluctant to leave the game, and his new gaming companion) John was really starting to understand the attraction of the entertainment system and had privately resolved to get himself one for his apartment, if only to sharpen his skills and playing ability. Taylor had 'died' a few times, but his skill with the controls equaled John's reflexes and he'd outscored John. And he suspected Joss knew that when she said with a smile in her voice, "Come on, Taylor, we gotta go. Spent more time here than I should, I have some shopping to do."

"Aw, c'mon, Mom, we were having fun!" Taylor groaned. "Weren't we, John?"

John nodded. "Can't you leave the boy here while you go shopping? He'd probably enjoy it a bit more."

Taylor nodded, eyes wide. "Pleeese, Mom!"

A moment of indecision; John could see the wheels turning in Joss's head. Leave her precious son being babysat by a trained killer, or drag that same precious son, complaining all the way, to the stores to do…whatever?

The Zoe stepped in. "Go ahead and leave John with the boy. Might do him some good. And we can go shopping." John blinked, but before he could say anything, Joss seemed to make a decision.

"Okay. You can stay. But," she held up a warning finger to curb the boyish enthusiasm, "You better listen to John. Don't argue with him, do what he says, and don't ask a million whys, okay?"

"Thanks, Mom!" And Taylor and John settled happily down to another game.

A very distant part of John's mind heard Zoe mutter into Joss's ear "Good, now we can do what we want to do" as they headed down the stairs, but it didn't sink in. It didn't occur to him to wonder if she might have had an ulterior motive in that decision.


	7. Chapter 7:and Take

**Chapter 7: …and Take**

It did, however, hit him when he opened the door to his apartment that evening. The words he'd only half-heard and hadn't really listened to came rushing back as he closed the door and stared.

A very distant part of his mind wondered how they'd managed to do this much in this short a time, but the rest of him was busy taking in the transformation that had happened to his apartment after he'd left it this morning. Because there was no doubt in his mind who was responsible for…this.

Deep burgundy curtains hung in the windows, all of them, floor to ceiling, with subtle threads of black and gold in an attractive pattern that still somehow seemed masculine. There was a matching rug on the floor, an enormous area carpet with a deep pile and similar black and gold patterning; the bed now had a thick plush comforter in black with deep burgundy patterning only a couple shades lighter than the comforter itself. The bed had dark cranberry sheets and pillowcases on it, and there were a couple of wall hangings, rather like tapestries, against the two walls that didn't have windows.

The overall effect was one that he rather liked. No, _really_ liked. And he knew who was responsible, and he grabbed his cellphone, hitting a number that he knew by heart now.

She answered immediately, as if she'd been waiting for his call. She probably had. There was a hint of laughter in her voice as she said, "Do you like it, John?"

"I have no idea what to say." He honestly didn't. "But yes, I do like it."

"Zoe mentioned that she knew where your apartment was, and that it was pretty sparse. She said she'd mentioned decorating it for you a couple of times, but you didn't seem to like her ideas. I remembered that you mentioned once that you like one of the pictures on my wall, so I figured maybe you like my taste in décor a bit more. We sneaked in, measured your windows for curtains and went shopping."

"I didn't want to tell Zoe I don't like her taste and hurt her feelings."

"Of course you didn't. But after shopping with her this afternoon, I understand why. She tried to pick out a few things that I was sure you wouldn't like. Beige and light blue are not your colors."

No they weren't. Definitely not.

Her voice turned slightly mischievous. "I always figured you for a man's man. Dark strong colors. And satin sheets…definitely not you."

Involuntarily he looked at the bed, and a picture flashed in his mind's eye. Joss, wrapped in cranberry satin sheets waiting for him to join her in bed. His bed. No, he wouldn't mind satin sheets if Joss was inside them.

Little John twitched.

He sternly ordered his mind away from that avenue of thought. "I do like it. All of it." And it surprised him, that she would know him and his tastes that well. "Thank you, Joss."

"Least I could do for a friend." Her voice was warm with understanding. "And now I have to thank you in return. Taylor hasn't stopped talking about how cool you are since I picked him up from the gym."

"He's a good kid. I liked spending time with him." And John was surprised to find that that was true. It had been a really fun afternoon—and there weren't a lot of things that John Reese called 'fun' that didn't involve guns or explosives.

Of course, the girls had been having their own version of fun. Although he really would have liked to know what they were planning before they did it, he couldn't argue with the results. "So how did you get into my apartment without a key?"

"Same way you get into my apartment without a key. What's good for the goose is good for the gander," she said with malicious sweetness. "Quid-pro-quo works both ways." He laughed outright as he disconnected the call.

The sheets she'd bought, which he discovered when he slipped into bed that night, were of excellent quality. Thick and soft, all-cotton, they felt good against even the most sensitive parts of his skin, and he just knew they'd feel particularly good when he slipped between them at the end of a long day that involved bruises. A small detail, but one that he appreciated—and he was sure he would appreciate even more when he was sore and aching—not like the stiff, starchy sheets that Zoe had bought for him once. Why did women think men didn't appreciate comfort as much as they did?

But Joss understood. Understood him in ways that even Zoe, who he'd known for quite some time now, didn't. Knew him even while he struggled to keep her at arm's length. As he drifted off to sleep, he remembered something Finch had said, the first time the Machine had given them Carter's number. "You have to be careful. Get too close and you risk getting caught." Well, he'd been caught. Well and truly caught, like a moth to a flame.

And somehow he didn't mind a bit.

"I believe we have a face, Mr. Reese," Finch said, and there was a definite note of satisfaction in his clipped tones. "The reconstruction program was able to make an estimate on the face of the killer based on the features under the ski mask. I'm running it through every photographic database I can find now."

Reese leaned forward. What stared back at him was a harsh face, craggy and weathered. White male, probably about forty, a veteran of the military, but there was a hard, angry edge in his gaze that he remembered seeing in Kara Stanton's eyes when he was partnered with her, way back when. An angry edge that spoke of a lack of empathy, too much of a willingness to kill, and a disregard for human life and the implications of taking it. The hard edge that had separated him from her; yes, he killed, and there were times he'd regretted the kill; times when he'd been reluctant to do the deed. Not like Kara Stanton, who assassinated without compunction, without hesitation, without caring, without a good reason other than that she was ordered to.

But he was going to kill this man. It was only a matter of time before they had a name to go with the face—he was sure of it, there would be a picture of this man in a military personnel database somewhere, and then they'd have a name. This monster didn't deserve to live, not after what he'd done to his victims; first Annelise Murray, and now their new victim, Dyana Spencer.

Carter had sent him a brief text message earlier that day. _Got vic's name. Dyana Spencer._ And with that name, Finch had been able to find her. Early thirties, a low-level administrative assistant for an office in midtown, small apartment on the Eastside. Her bio was uncannily similar to Annelise Murray's; twenty-nine, small apartment on the Eastside, worked in Lower Manhattan as a receptionist for a law firm.

And both women were single parents, though Annelise had a little boy with whom she shared joint custody. The initial paperwork had Carter's notes that said she'd most likely been grabbed in the act of having just dropped her son off at a train station, to send him to his father's for a visitation weekend. Dyana Spencer had a child too, a teenage girl who Detective Robinson had noted had just loaded the girl on a train to visit a potential college choice—Finch had been able to hack into the NYPD's computer system and seen Robinson's report, They didn't know if Robinson was going to share the contents of his report with Carter, but just in case he didn't, they'd downloaded a copy into their system for her to look at later.

"They seem to be good parents—not unlike Detective Carter," Finch said, and Reese nodded even as that mental image of Joss Carter tied and beaten flashed across his mind again. For her sake, he was determined to catch this guy before she did—she fit the profile of his victims, and he did not want to see her number come up again. Not from this guy.

And while he'd had regrets over some of the people he'd killed, none of those regrets were going to be for this man.

Carter tried not to smile as she felt Robinson's eyes on her across the squadroom. Due to the high profile of Dyana Spencer's parents' political connections, the higher-ups had declared that any knowledge gleaned about the case should be shared with everyone, and thus they were holding an early-morning briefing for everyone in the precinct on the Crucifixion Killer. As much as Robinson didn't want to share details of the case with her, he was now obliged to share with everyone in the squadroom, and her by extension. Although it rankled that the surveillance footage Reese and Finch had dug up (and that she had subsequently gotten another copy of, legitimately, so she didn't have to answer questions about where it came from and how she'd gotten it) was currently being touted as Robinson's good detective work, she firmly squashed it down. What did it matter who got the credit for what? As long as they eventually took down the Crucifixion Killer, that was all that mattered.

And by doing a little discreet digging herself she'd understood why Robinson felt the way he did about her. He didn't have a good record for closing the cases sitting on his desk. She, before her demotion, had had one of the best—her closure rate was about 80%. Although a portion of that was directly attributable to Reese and Finch's help, even before she'd first met them three years ago her closure rate had been about 75%, so while she appreciated the guys' help, they'd only contributed a little bit to her success, a fact that she was proud of.

But Robinson was not a good detective. He would have been better remaining a beat cop; he didn't have the concentration and ability to figure out a problem that a good detective had. Detective was only a stop for him, and she had a feeling as soon as he had the seniority to take the Sergeant's exam, he would do so and happily take a seat jockeying a desk. Better for him, better for all of them—just get him out of the way so those who were good at figuring out problems could do their jobs. She, on the other hand—she'd been close to being able to take the Sergeant's Exam, and her Captain had hinted to her that she should consider it, but she loved being a detective, loved where she was, and wouldn't have cared if she spent the rest of her NYPD career as a detective. It was what she was best at, and what she liked the most.

And of course, it gave her the leeway and freedom necessary to help Reese and Finch out…

She tuned out the self-aggrandizing platitudes of the man standing in front of the assembled officers, and focused her attention on what she knew of the case. Reese had texted her back with what they'd been able to find of Dyana Spencer's past, and she also couldn't wait to get off work so she could find out what they knew about the Crucifixion Killer. Because there was no doubt in anyone's mind anymore that they were dealing with a serial killer, and even without the pressure from the upper echelons of the police department, all of the members of Manhattan South Homicide felt the urgency in their quest: catch the Killer before he killed again.

Meeting over, the officers in the squadroom headed off to their respective tasks, and she approached Detective Robinson. "So what's on the agenda today?"

He glared at her sourly; apparently being praised for finding the surveillance camera footage had only made him feel more inadequate, rather than less; because he knew who had really found the footage, knew who really deserved the credit. She refused to allow his sour looks to rattle her, remembering her promise to John. "Forensics is trying to match the make and model of tire to the make and model of the SUV that was seen in the yard," he said grumpily. "You're going to go with me to interview Dyana Spencer's parents. Maybe they will have noticed someone following her."

It was on the tip of Carter's tongue to tell Robinson that would be a dead end. If the killer had followed her, it would indicate premeditation—and premeditation would have drawn Finch and Reese's attention. But she couldn't tell him that without telling him _how_ she knew it was a dead end, and so she resigned herself to going down this dead end with him.

The Spencers lived in a rowhouse mansion on the upper West side. The father, Robert Spencer, was in the tech business and his company held a few city contracts, though not enough that it would raise eyebrows since he was friends with the mayor and a State Senator. He'd grown up in a Harlem ghetto, gotten a scholarship to an Ivy League school, and built his business from the ground up. He was married, and had three children—Dyana had been their oldest child and their only daughter; Mikel, their middle son, was a priest; and their youngest, Jordan, was following in their Father's footsteps and was currently managing a division of his father's company.

The Spencers looked heartbroken and lost when they opened the door to Robinson and Carter, and Robinson, unfortunately, didn't seem to know how to handle grief. "Good morning, Mr. and Mrs Spencer. We're here to talk to you about your daughter's murder." Mrs. Spencer held a handkerchief up to her eyes, and Carter had to resist the urge to kick him.

"We're so sorry for your loss," she said instead, quietly, gently, and Mr. Spencer looked up at her with gratitude shining in his eyes. "We just have a couple of questions. It won't take too long. May we come in?"

A moment's hesitation, and then Mr. Spencer stepped away from the door, an unspoken invitation. Robinson walked in, but it was immediately obvious his mind wasn't on the case; his eyes roved everywhere, taking in the exquisite furnishings and plainly expensive bric-a-brac. Mr. Spencer seemed to have done a lot of traveling, and there were framed photos, relics of his travels hung on the walls, with the names of the countries those photos were taken in hanging next to them.

Carter knew better—and her interest wasn't in what they had, but what they'd lost. While Robinson sat back, eyed the furnishings, and inserted a brusque, gruff question here and there, she ignored the surroundings in favor of asking the questions that she already knew the answers to, but that they still needed to ask. Had Dyana been experiencing any harassment? Anyone taking an unhealthy interest in her? Former boyfriends? Her husband had been a traveling businessman, and they had divorced when Dyana's daughter, Ayala, was six—he'd been having an affair with a woman in Italy. Dyana had raised her daughter with her parents' help, since her ex-husband hadn't been willing to share custody or remain a part of his child's life.

Everything about Dyana indicated she was a good mother, devoted to her daughter, committed to her family. She hadn't had any serious relationships after her husband divorced her, and both the Spencers assured Carter that she'd really been in love with her husband and his betrayal of their marriage vows had hurt her deeply. "She never looked at anyone else after that, not seriously," Mrs. Spencer said now, speaking mostly to Carter since Robinson seemed to have tuned them all out completely, a fact that was irritating Carter to no end. She took pride in her job, and her work, and to see someone else behaving in such a cavalier way about solving a crime that had ended another person's life was grating on her nerves. And she said so to Reese and Finch that evening as they updated her on their investigation; they'd learned more that day than she had, thanks to Robinson's inept fumbling and unwillingness to listen.

"You give everything you have to your job, Joss," John pointed out, "You understand that what you do makes a difference in someone's life, and it's serious for you. A matter of honor. Robinson doesn't have that dedication, doesn't really care. This is a paycheck for him, nothing more. That's what makes you a Detective and a human being, and that makes him…" he made a dismissive noise.

She grinned at him. "I'll remember you said that."

_**Author's Endnote: **__I've spent the first seven chapters of 'Catalyst' using little incidents to define the relationship that I envision between the characters. Now that you can see what I see behind my eyes, it's time to kick the storyline in gear. The action's going to pick up quite a bit in the upcoming chapters—stay tuned!_


	8. Chapter 8: Debt

**Chapter 8: Debt**

"Are you busy?"

Joss smiled at her phone even as she got up from her couch, heading into her bedroom to change out of her sweats and into something more appropriate for what she knew was coming. "Not at the moment, John."

"I was wondering if you're up to a little…excitement."

She laughed aloud as she shrugged into a black sweater and put on her sneakers. "If I wanted a boring life I wouldn't be a cop, John," she said. "What's up this time?"

"Someone with a gambling habit got in a little over his head. His wife found out, but instead of ditching him, which is what I would have done, she got a bank loan to pay off the loan sharks harassing her and her husband. He's promised her he'll never do it again."

"Yeah, we all know how that story ends," Joss scoffed.

She could hear the grim smile in John's voice. "I'm planning on breaking up that little payout party. I'm not trying to save the guy—as far as I'm concerned he deserves what he's getting—but she's innocent and I don't want to see her hurt."

"Yeah, that sounds like you," Joss said. "How long do you think this is gonna take?"

"Not long. Couple of hours." Then, as if he guessed why she was asking, he said, "Taylor's a big boy, Joss. You raised him well. Don't worry, the house will still be standing by the time you get back."

"Smart-ass," Joss said affectionately, but she tapped on Taylor's room door before she opened it. "Taylor? I'm going out for a couple of hours, you gonna be okay here by yourself?"

He looked up. "Where are you going?"

She shrugged. "Out." Then, firmly reminding herself that he was sixteen and didn't have to be sheltered anymore, she relented. "Gotta go break up a little illegal gambling party."

He put his game controller down. "With John?"

"Does that worry you?" She cupped her hand over the speaker on her phone so John wouldn't hear this conversation—not that she had any hope that this would be private.

"Not really. He's cool, he'll keep an eye on you." He came over to her, hugged her. "Be careful, okay?"

"Of course. I'm always careful." She hugged him back.

"No, you're not," he stepped back and looked at her intently, and she felt a flash of surprise as she realized just how much he'd grown—and how serious he was. "You forget about yourself sometimes, Mom. Remember, a few years back, we were having breakfast and I asked you who had you back, and you said you could take care of yourself? And you said that as long as we had each other, we'd be okay? I want to continue having you, and if you're not careful, I won't." she looked at him and saw real worry for her in his eyes. "But if John's got your back, then I know he'll make sure you're okay."

"Gee, thanks for not having confidence in me," she said, but her smile was warm as she put her phone down on his dresser and wrapped her arms around him tightly. "Thanks," she whispered as they hugged, too soft for John, listening on the other end of the line, to hear, and then stepped back. "Now, I want you to behave yourself, no wild parties, no girls, okay?"

"Okay, Mom," Taylor groaned "Geez, Mom, I've heard this lecture for sixteen years. I'm going to be fine."

"If something comes up you go up to Mrs. Hartnett upstairs, okay? And if she's not home call Grandmom." Taylor nodded with an expression of long-suffering patience but a grin, and she carried that grin with her as she grabbed her phone off her dresser. "All right. Are you driving or am I driving myself?"

"I'll pick you up," John said. "I'm already outside."

"Now how did you know that I was going to say yes?" But it was a rhetorical question, not one that she expected an answer to. John knew her like few other people did. She shook her head as she disconnected the phone, and turned for one last look behind her as she headed down the front steps. Taylor was standing in the window, gave her a small wave, then gave John, waiting in the big purple GTO on the street, a bigger wave. John waved back as she got into the front passenger seat.

"He's a good kid, Joss," he said quietly as they drove through the streets. "Not really the type for wild parties and girls."

"He's a boy, John. And a kid. A good kid, but a kid nonetheless. And kids do stupid stuff sometimes." She shrugged. "I just remind him of his responsibilities and he knows he has to answer to me if he doesn't."

"And what about your responsibility to him? Do you answer to him when you do something stupid?"

She mumbled something and didn't meet his eyes.

He grinned and decided to change the subject. "Little dive off Canal Street in Lower Manhattan. The bar's a front, there's gambling tables in the back, some really high-stakes games. Loan sharks hover around, looking for an easy score. Unfortunately for this number, her husband got in trouble with one of the loan sharks." He looked at her. "Stupid question, I know, but…are you carrying?"

"Come on, John. I know better than to go anywhere with you not armed." She scoffed as she pulled open her jacket, and he saw the holster with her gun tucked into it. "And I've even got the new one you gave me." A holster on the other side, with her new Nano tucked in it. "Are you packing?" He just grinned at her, a wolfish smile with an anticipatory gleam in his eye, and she shook her head as she answered her own question. "Of course you are."

They parked outside a seedy dive and sat for long moments, scanning traffic. Joss had no idea what John's target looked like, but in the end it wasn't too hard to spot—a black Lincoln, very out-of-place for this neighborhood, pulling up in front of the bar. A well-dressed blond woman stepped out—and if Carter had any doubts that this was their target, it was erased by the sight of the designer heels the woman wore. Definitely out of place for this neighborhood.

The man who got out of the car's passenger side seemed a little more at home in this neighborhood. The quality of his clothing was still a few steps above what the denizens of this street could afford, but they were nondescript, dark, and you could miss the good quality if you didn't look too hard. His eyes shifted around, watching the street; definitely someone who knew what lurked in the darkness of this neighborhood. Not like the woman, who walked as if she were taking a Sunday stroll at a country club, confident in herself and sure that no one was going to dare touch her. Carter shook her head. "How'd he score a woman like that?" she sighed. "Love really is blind." She looked at John, only to find him looking back at her with an unreadable expression. "What?" she said.

"Nothing. Let's go. There's an employee entrance in back that we can use to get in."

She rolled her eyes as she got out of the car. _Men_. But she couldn't help but watch as, in an instant, he changed from the caring, quiet man she knew as 'John' into the ruthless, calculated killer she knew as 'Reese'.

They circled around the back of the bar to the back alley. Carter wrinkled her nose at the smell of rotting garbage and other nameless substances normally found in a New York alley, but tuned it out and focused on the job at hand. Reese moved with catlike stealth that belied his size; you'd never think someone that tall could move that quietly.

The back door was propped open and the smells of cooking food came from the door. A kitchen, then; but there was no way in hell Carter would have ever eaten anything that came out of that kitchen. She made a mental note to officially check the bar out on some pretense or other, fairly soon; the health department would have a field day with the violations she was seeing. It was a miracle no one had died yet from what was coming out of the kitchen.

The workers in the kitchen didn't seem alarmed to see two strangers walking in the back door with guns in hand. Obviously, they were used to it, which made Carter take another mental note. Loansharking was a small but lucrative side business for organized crime; and in this city, organized crime also meant HR was involved. Just another small step toward bringing them down for what they'd done to her—and to Cal.

Reese stopped dead just as they approached the small viewing window in the doors leading from the kitchen into the room beyond; he held his hand raised, fingers curled in a fist, knuckles facing her, in military sign language for 'halt'. She stopped before she'd even consciously processed the hand signal, something else that made a very distant part of her shake her head at how ingrained her military training had been, but the rest of her attention was focused on the scene in front of her.

A small room, maybe about fifteen feet square, with a couple of card tables. Each table had four men sitting around it, and Carter's quick eyes found four darker-than-black solid shadows in the rear of the room, leaning against the wall, relaxed and alert. Two of them had what looked like large automatic rifles, Russian by the looks of them. Yet another possible tie to HR, and the Russian mob. There had been a game in progress, which had come to an abrupt halt as the well-dressed woman walked into the room, striding in as if she owned the place. "I've come to pay off my husband's debt," she said, putting an attaché case down on the floor beside her heel. Behind her, her husband slunk into the room, staying well behind her and close to the door, as if ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.

"He owes us nearly twenty thousand dollars," said one of the men in the room, short, pale skin and dark hair. Despite his seated position in a small metal folding chair, the rest of the armed thugs in the room obviously deferred to him, making him the leader—a fat that was not lost on the brainless woman standing in the middle of the room. "You got that kinda money?"

"It's all there," the woman said briskly, taking off her gloves and sliding the attaché case across the floor toward the man. "Now, as I understand it, the terms are simple. You get your money, my husband and I get our lives back. He will never darken you door again."

She moved toward the door, and the sitting man raised a hand, at which sign two of the armed goons along the far wall, sill mostly in shadow, also moved toward the door to block off the exit. In front of her, Carter saw Reese tense. "You can't leave yet."

"Why not? It's all there, I give you my word!" she looked contemptuously around her "If I have to wait for you Neanderthals to count all of it, I'll be here all night."

"If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes." The boss signaled, and one of the unarmed goons crossed the room, picked up the case, put it on the table, and opened it. The boss picked up a wad of bills, opened the rubber band, and thumbed through it.

"See? It's all there. Now we're going."

The armed goons moved then, to block the door. The husband, interestingly enough, hadn't moved; he remained slouched by the door, ignored by everyone else in the room.

_He's in on it,_ Carter realized at the same time Reese looked at her. He didn't have to say anything; they both understood what was going to happen in that room. The husband had promised the crime boss his own wife to get out of debt, and the wife had no idea what was going to happen to her. It was a high price to pay for being so stupid as to pick _that_ man as her husband; Carter shook her head. Love really was blind. And deaf. And dumb.

But it was a price that, thanks to Reese and Carter, she wouldn't have to pay.

They saw it, saw the moment when she realized what was supposed to happen to her; she stared at the boss, then at her husband, then at the two guys flanking her with weapons. "Trevor?" she stammered. "Trevor, what's going on? You said all we had to do was pay the debt, and they'd let you go."

"Of course. We aren't barbarians, we keep our word. As soon as his debt's paid, he's free to go." He leaned in, a cold leer darkening his features. "And you were part of the payment. As soon as we get our payment, he's free to go. Pretty white woman like you, fetch a pretty price on the international market."

Carter revised her opinion of these thugs sharply. Those weren't the words of a petty local crime gang; this was a gang with international connections, and loansharking would be only one small piece of a very large pie. Human trafficking and arms smuggling were two of the most lucrative international crime franchises, and apparently this gang was eyeballs-deep in both. Reese's target was destined for some filthy-rich billionaire's household somewhere, a high-priced sex slave.

Not on Carter's watch.

"I'll go first. You follow. I'll draw their fire, you get that woman out of here." Reese's whispered instructions were terse, clipped; Carter simply nodded and steeled herself, feeling adrenaline racing through her.

She saw the twitch in Reese's shoulder muscle a moment before he moved, and she already had her gun out—the Nano, not her service piece; unless she absolutely had to, she didn't want to leave official NYPD bullets at a crime scene that she couldn't explain later. Reese stepped through the swinging doors from the kitchen first, and took advantage of the element of surprise to open fire.

The first burst of fire from him took out the two goons closest to the door. The husband just froze, looking petrified; it took barely half a second for Reese to adjust his aim and fire a fraction of an inch lower; the husband screamed and went down, his right knee destroyed. Carter didn't feel a bit sorry for him.

Not that she had time to; she'd only waited long enough for the thugs to give Reese their undivided attention, and she ran into the room, grabbed the arm of the stunned woman, and drag her out of the way of the two remaining goons. She shoved the woman behind her, against the wall, and planted herself in front; they would have to kill her to get past her. And as she looked around, she saw the other gamblers at the other tables racing out of the room; good, there were less people. Not that they were exactly innocents, but they weren't involved in the issue that had brought Carter and Reese there.

Two of the remaining thugs attacked Reese at the same time; one got a cracked skull for his pains as Reese heaved the man bodily into the wall, headfirst. He didn't pause, but turned to deal with the second man who'd grabbed him, a big man who had to weigh half again what Reese did but didn't have anywhere near the speed, quickness and agility of the ex-CIA assassin.

"On your six…!" Carter saw the movement behind Reese, just a moment too late. The boss had risen from his chair with a hunting knife in his hand and lunged for Reese; hampered by the heavy thug who still had his arms wrapped around Reese's upper shoulders, he only just managed to get his forearms up in time to take the blade meant for his heart on the underside of his forearms. Carter made a quick decision, took aim, and fired with her Nano—the Nano she would now not be able to carry openly because she'd just put heat on it.

The boss dropped, and Reese quickly, efficiently, dispatched the gorilla hanging off his back by the simple expedient of running backwards into the wall and knocking the guy cold. The man hit the wall, his arms loosened from around Reese's torso, sagged, didn't move.

Reese still fired a single shot into the guy, finishing him off.

The woman was standing behind Carter, paralyzed, as Carter flew across the intervening space to Reese. His forearms were deeply gashed, and bleeding heavily; she yanked off her light jacket, tying it around his left arm, which was bleeding the most; he grabbed his other arm, which had only gotten a glancing graze, from the boss's knife, and addressed the woman. "If I were you I'd find a good divorce lawyer."

She just nodded, looking dazed. Her pupils were dilated in shock, and Carter had to reach into her pocket, extract her cell phone, and shove it into her hand. "Call the police."

The woman blinked twice, hard, and then her shaking hands started tapping the keys on her phone. Carter took that as a sign that she and Reese had better hit the road—it was a pretty sure bet that the gunshots had sparked a few calls to dispatch, even in this seedy neighborhood, and she couldn't be here when they got here. And neither could Reese.

She didn't know how badly he was hurt; the knife obviously hadn't hit an artery but he was still bleeding pretty badly, and of course, a hospital was out of the question. She made a quick decision; his apartment was too far away, her place was closer; if she could get him home she could check him out. If it needed stitches she could call Sam Shaw from her apartment.

John wasn't a big man, but for all his slim, muscular build, that muscle weighed a ton. If he hadn't still been conscious she would never have been able to get him into the passenger side of the GTO, and then she folded herself behind the wheel and floored the pedal.


	9. Chapter 9: First Aid

**Chapter 9: First Aid**

Taylor must have been watching out the window for her return, because the front door opened even as she was trying to guide John up the front steps to her door. She hoped that if anyone was watching, they would think they were seeing someone helping a man who'd had a little too much to drink.

She hustled him in and Taylor closed the door behind them. Although it would have been easier to just drop John on her couch, she wasn't about to have him bleed all over it—if she ever had to have a crime scene investigation team in her apartment, finding John's blood all over her furniture would be a bit hard to explain. So she got him into the bathroom. "Taylor, get some towels." Her son disappeared without a word.

She dropped John on her bathroom floor. He'd lost just enough blood to make him disoriented, and she doubted that he was really aware of what she was doing as she untied her jacket from around his right arm. He winced, sucking in a harsh breath from between gritted teeth, but that was a good sign; the edges of the jacket and torn shirt sleeves had already started sticking to the wound, which meant it was clotting. Hadn't hit any major blood vessels, then. She threw her jacket on the floor out in the hallway and then unbuttoned his formerly crisp white shirt, sliding it off his shoulders. The sleeves were slashed and ruined, and she knew neither her jacket nor his shirt was remotely salvageable, and a very distant part of her mind wondered how many shirts he'd ruined by just such means.

Taylor returned with towels, and she grabbed the first one he handed her. A dark brown one, and she draped that over John's lap so he could rest his arms on it; then she took the second one he'd handed her and draped that over John's shoulders; he was starting to shiver. Chills, from shock. Not good; she had to get those wounds closed and the bleeding stopped _now_. "Taylor, grab my wallet and run to the corner pharmacy. I need several boxes of butterfly closures, those little adhesive ones that hold a wound closed, and four rolls of two-inch wide elastic bandages." Taylor nodded and was gone.

She left John's side for just a moment, just long enough to grab a clean washcloth from her closet and a large mixing bowl from her kitchen cabinet that she rarely ever used. Putting that down in the bottom of the bathtub, she ran cool water into it, talking to John as she did so. "Come on now, John, don't black out on me, okay? Need you to stay with me…" He blinked at her, but seemed to be making an effort to stay awake as she sat on the bathroom floor beside him with the bowl of water.

He let out an anguished hiss as she gently took his left arm and applied the wet washcloth to the blood caked on his arms; she tried to be gentle, but some pain was unavoidable. "Sorry, John," she said quietly as she rinsed the washcloth in the water bowl. "I'm trying here." He nodded, the movement costing some effort, and leaned his head back against the wall. His eyes were closed, but she knew from his breathing, and the occasional wince or hissed breath, that he wasn't asleep or unconscious.

She had both arms cleaned as best she could by the time Taylor got back; she ripped open one of the boxes of butterfly closures and carefully wiped around the edge of the gash on his left arm, twining her fingers with his and holding his arm up above the level of his heart to decrease the amount of bloodflow to his arm. As she wiped some of the clotted blood, the cut started bleeding again, but it was nowhere near as profuse as it had been; good. "Taylor, grab John's hand and hold his arm up so I can put these butterflies on," and she saw her son's wide-eyed look as he complied. She placed the butterfly closures at one-centimeter intervals along his arm, using ten of the things to close the cut on his left arm; it was going to be a couple of days before the edges sealed, and she hoped that Finch wouldn't need Reese's help before that gash was well on its way to healing.

Left arm done, she turned her attention to his right arm; the cut here wasn't as long and wasn't as deep, and was in fact mostly superficial. She still used three of the closures along the wound, just to make sure they sealed shut, then had Taylor hold each arm, in turn, as she wrapped elastic bandages around his forearms. Tight enough to prevent him from dislodging the closures, tight enough to put pressure on the cuts, not tight enough to cut off circulation. Just to make sure, she tested the temperature of his hand when she was done; it was still warm. Good. His pulse, when she took it on the inside of his wrist, was steady. Also good.

She grabbed another washcloth, a clean one, and wiped the rest of his upper body down, removing the last of the sweat and dirt and blood and grime from their adventure this evening. He was nearly unconscious by then, and she sighed as she realized he'd be her guest for the night; he was way too big for her couch, and the only other alternative… "Taylor, let's get him up and put him in my bed."

If Taylor had any reservations about that, he didn't say anything, just approached John's other side. Between the two of them, they half-lifted, half- carried him down the short hall to Joss's bedroom, being careful not to pull on his arms or jar them, and it was a sigh of relief that she finally sat him down on the end of her bed.

She stripped off his shoes and socks, left those neatly beside the bed, and pulled the covers back from under him. "Need one more towel," she said to Taylor, and the boy disappeared, returning moments later with the requested item. She slid that onto the bed under John's torso—if the cuts started bleeding in the middle of the night, it would be easier just to change the towel instead of the sheets—and then supported his arms as he lay back on the bed. She lifted his long legs into the bed, then coved him well with the sheets and blanket, going to her closet for another blanket—ironically, the same one he'd covered her with a week ago—just to make sure that he'd be warm after those chills he'd gotten from shock and blood loss. Then they left her bedroom, closing the door, and once out in the hallway she finally let herself lean against the all, feeling the last of her own adrenaline leaving her. "Thanks, buddy," she said, smiling fondly at her son.

"It's okay, Mom," he said, leaning against the opposite wall of the hallway, watching her. "Um…what happened?"

"Bad guy attacked John with a knife. Cut his arm up. You saw." The boy nodded. "He can't go anywhere tonight. I'm gonna let him sleep it off here. You gonna be okay?" Heck, it wasn't every day that the average sixteen year old watched his mother bandage a trained killer in the bathroom!

"Um, yeah." Taylor had seemed to be surprised, but not in shock; he was taking it rather well, all things considered. "Do you want my bed, Mom? I can sleep on the couch…"

"Absolutely not," she said firmly, although she was so tired right now she could fall asleep standing up. "I have to keep an eye on John tonight and make sure he doesn't start bleeding again." She reached out, hooked him in the crook of her arm, and pulled him in a hug. "Thanks for all your help this evening." She released him. "Now go on in to bed." She remained in the hallway, watching as he went into his room and closed the door, and only then did she allow her shoulders to slump and give in to the exhaustion she was really feeling.

Her clothes were blood-stained; she grabbed a set of sweats and an old t-shirt out of the laundry hamper; one more night wouldn't hurt them, and right now she just wanted to get out of what she was wearing. Once changed, she tidied up the bathroom; a good scrub with bleach was what was really needed, but not tonight, this weekend would be soon enough. She just made sure that it was tidy and no immediately visible trace of a bleeding man was evident, then she wandered into her kitchen to fix a cup of hot tea.

She was in the process of stirring in honey when her cellphone rang. 'Unknown'. She smiled crookedly and answered it. "Carter."

"Detective Carter. Thank you for answering at this hour of the morning." Finch. She sneaked a peek at her clock—sure enough, it was nearly 2 AM. "I was hoping you could answer a question for me—"

"If you want to know where John is, he's here at my place," she said tiredly. Finch could be overly wordy sometimes—how had Fusco put it? 'High-dollar vocabulary'? She'd even learned new words in the course of conversing with him. She just wasn't in the mood tonight, and she hoped he wouldn't take offense at the way she'd cut him off and interrupted him. "He asked me to back him up when he went to keep a woman from paying off her husband's illegal gambling debt…" and she gave him a very brief, succinct rundown of their evening. "He was bleeding pretty bad so I brought him back to my place and patched him up. He's sleeping it off now."

"If he needs a doctor I could call Ms. Shaw…"

"It was a surface wound, bled a lot but superficial. If you want to have Sam come by tomorrow morning you can, but not now—Taylor's asleep." She stifled a yawn herself—she'd really like to be asleep right now.

"Then for now, I will trust your judgment, Detective Carter. And thank you."

"We're friends, Harold. No thanks needed. Remember, friends help you move. Good friends help you move bodies."

She heard Harold chuckle on the other end of the line. "Then both John and I are lucky you're one of our best friends."

"Yeah, remember that when I need your help again."

She'd been joking, and so was slightly taken aback when Harold said, with perfect seriousness, on the other end of the phone, "We will indeed, Joss. Whatever you need, you or Taylor. You have only to call us."

"I'll remember that. Good night, Harold."

"Good night, Joss. Don't forget to get some rest yourself."

Alone now, she wandered down the hall one more time, taking a quick peek in her bedroom. John was asleep and she stepped in to check his bandages. She didn't try to move quietly, knowing that stealth was the best and fastest way to wake him up; normal movements, normal sounds, wouldn't awaken his watchful instinct.

As she sat on the side of the bed and twitched the covers back to check the bandages, he opened one eye. "It's all right, John. Go to sleep. I'm right here. Just wanted to make sure you're not bleeding again." His left arm looked good, no seepage. Since he was curled up on his right side, she had to lean a little further in to check his right arm, and so she heard his voice, a bare whisper of sound, just as he burrowed his head deeper into the pillow and surrendered to deep sleep.

She straightened up abruptly, looking down at him, tears springing to her eyes. Had he just said 'Thanks, I love you?' She shook her head. _He's injured, he's in shock from blood loss and he's probably not gonna remember that he said anything tomorrow. He can't have meant it. He's just delirious or halfway in a dream. Maybe about Jessica. _He couldn't have said that to her, couldn't have meant for her to hear that. Had to be about someone else, to someone else. Not to her, or for her.

But she leaned in and brushed her lips against his temple, whispered softly into his ear. "Love you too, John."

It was too bad she couldn't say that to him while he was awake.

The sound of stealthy footsteps was what awoke John the next morning.

He blinked, confused for a moment. Not his apartment. Where was he? Then fuzzy memories of the night before rushed back, and he sat up.

The sudden movement brought a rush of light-headedness, and he groaned as he rubbed his temple. That disclosed the swath of bandages on both arms, and he stared at them as his mind sorted out the bits and pieces of memory from the night before.

The fight. The flash of a knife, Joss's instant reaction to it. Scrambled memories of sitting in the front passenger seat of the GTO as she drove, her voice urging him to stay with her. He'd still been sort of out of it by the time they got here—her home? Yes, her apartment, to judge by the décor he saw on the walls, and when he looked down, he saw the blanket on top of him was the same one he'd used to cover Joss a week ago. And he remembered her cleaning his arms and bandaging them, although most of the details of that operation were lost to a fog of pain and dizziness. He didn't remember her getting him into her bedroom, tucking him into her bed, although he had a faint impression that she'd checked his bandages at least once that night. And a soft whisper in his ear, 'Love you…'

He shook his head. It should have been in Jessica's voice; she was the last person he could remember who had said that to him, but this memory was in Joss's voice. She wouldn't have said that to him. It had to be the shock and the blood loss. And his own mixed-up memories.

He untangled his legs from the bedcovers, swung his legs over the edge, and stood up. A little dizziness, but otherwise okay; he supposed it was a good thing he usually healed quickly. His shirt was gone—okay, he remembered that the sleeves were slashed, and bloody, and he could hardly expect Joss to tuck him into her own bed wearing a blood-stained shirt. His shoes, with socks tucked neatly into them, sat beside the bed.

He crossed the room, stepped into the hall, surprising Taylor in the act of stepping into the bathroom. The boy put a finger to his lips and pointed down the hall, and John padded down the hall until he could see the living room. Joss lay on her couch, asleep, hair tangled across the couch pillow; a forgotten cup of now-cold tea sat on the coffee table, and she'd tugged a green wool blanket, obviously old Army issue, over her as she slept. John turned to Taylor with a smile. "Let's not wake her, hmm?" The boy nodded and vanished into the bathroom.

John retuned to Joss's bedroom, paused. He'd never been in here before. Never had a reason to. It looked like her; warm and comfortable, inviting and neat. He paused by her vanity, looking at the framed pictures taped to the edges of the mirror there. Lots of pictures of Taylor, at varying ages. Joss and an older woman he supposed was her mother; Joss and Taylor's father, Paul, younger. A picture of Joss in an Army dress uniform—Class B's, from the looks of it, the semi-formal uniform.

No pictures of him.

He didn't understand why he felt a pang at that omission. Logic dictated that she couldn't have a picture of him there—if anyone came looking for him, his picture on her mirror would be a dead giveaway and that would put her life in danger; and also, he wasn't that important to her. But he also didn't understand the irrational surge of relief that Cal Beecher's picture wasn't on her dresser either; on the mantelpiece in the living room, yes, but not here, not in her bedroom. There was a framed photo of her and Taylor on her bedside, in a handsome brass frame under clear glass that showed no sign of dust, but that was all.

He rejoined the boy in the kitchen. Taylor was tucking into a bowl of cereal; his backpack was already sitting on the table. "How do you feel?" he asked John quietly.

"Lot better than last night, thanks to your Mom," John said.

Taylor grinned. "Yeah, you were a mess last night. I couldn't believe what you looked like when Mom dragged you up the front steps. You looked pretty bad." He polished off the last bite of cereal and put his bowl in the sink—still quietly. "Here." He grabbed a pile of cloth off the kitchen counter behind him and held it out to John. "It's my Dad's, he left a change of clothes here once and never got around to coming back and getting them. It might be a little small—he's a little shorter than you—but it should fit enough for you to get home and change into your clothes." He considered John. "You know, maybe you should think about bringing a change of your clothes here just in case this happens again. That way you'll have your own clothes."

"Maybe you should discuss that with your Mom before you make those kinds of decisions, hmm?" came a cheerful voice from behind them, and they both tuned to see Joss standing behind there. She walked into the kitchen, smiling, as Taylor shrugged.

"I didn't think you'd mind." He picked up his backpack. "I'll see you this evening, Mom. Better get going or I'm going to be late. And you should get going or you're going to be late too." Then he stepped back and looked at Joss. "Maybe you should take the day off. You look tired."

"I'll be fine. Go on." She and John both watched him as he bounced out of the apartment.


	10. Chapter 10: Revelations

**Chapter 10: Revelations**

_Author's note: Well, folks, I've tried everything I could think of. In the master manuscript when there's a scene change, I mark the change with a line of three asterisks. Somehow, when I post the chapter, that line disappears. I tried a line of hyphens; that disappeared too. I've had to resort to actually typing 'scene break' between scenes or shifts in character viewpoint; I realize it's awkward and breaks up the flow of the story but I can't figure out any other way. If you know how to do this, please PM me._

_And now, on with the story!_

"Thanks, Joss," he said when the apartment was quiet again.

She shrugged as she reached for the can of coffee. "Harold said the same thing last night. I told him what else are friends for?" she grinned. "I told him the old joke 'friends help you move; good friends help you move bodies.' He seemed to find that funny."

"I'm glad we're best friends, then."

"Harold said that too. I think you've been hanging around him too much. He's starting to rub off on you." A quick grin. "All right, while I'm making this coffee, how about you go get dressed. I'm not in the mood for one of Sam's smart-aleck comments when she comes in and sees you standing shirtless and shoeless in my kitchen."

"Sam's coming?"

"Harold said he'd send her by this morning to check up on my doctoring skills."

John grinned; he could just imagine what Sam would think of to say if she came in and found him in his current state. "I guess I'll spare you that, then, and go and get dressed."

"You do that," she said.

By the time he was dressed—and yes, Taylor was right, the t-shirt shirt was a little small for him—coffee was ready and she excused herself to go get ready for work. By the time she came back to the kitchen, Sam was at the door. It was John who opened the door and let her in.

"Well, don't you both look cozy and domestic," she grinned.

"Sam!" Joss and John said at the same time.

"Okay, okay," she said, holding both hands up in mock surrender, but there was a look in her eye that told John he wasn't quite off the hook yet—she'd discuss it with him later. "So let me see what Harold was talking about."

She unwound the elastic bandages around John's forearms, inspected the cuts. They looked bad, to Joss; worse than they'd looked the night before. Last night the butterfly closures on John's pale skin had reduced the edges of the cut to a thin, straight red line; but now that the skin and tissue had had a chance to react to the trauma of being slashed open, the edges looked dark red, angry. Joss held her breath, sure that Sam was going to say that Joss had botched the job of patching John up.

But Sam did no such thing. She examined the wound, carefully probing the discolored areas of flesh, ignoring John's glare and hissed breaths, then nodded and sat back. "Pretty good for a home job. It'll heal clean. Not going to need stitches."

Joss let out the breath she was holding as Sam rewound the bandages around John's forearms. "Okay, so now that you all are done, maybe you all can leave so I can get to work?" There was no rancor in Joss's voice.

"Sure. I'll take him out of your hair for you," Sam said happily. "I came downtown on the bus so I could drive John's GTO home."

"You're not driving my car, Shaw," John said.

She smirked. "Sure I am. Watch me." And Joss laughed as they left, John protesting all the way.

_******scene break******_

"So what happened last night?" Sam said from the passenger side as John brought the GTO to a stop at a light.

"Woman made a bad choice of husbands."

"Any woman who gets married makes a bad choice," Sam snapped. "That's not what I meant, John, and you know it. What happened between you and Joss last night?"

"Nothing happened. I got hurt, Joss patched me up—rather well, you saw her work…and she let me spend the night."

"From what Harold said, she didn't have much choice but let you sleep there. She's too nice to kick you home." Sam gave him a sidelong glance. "She's also too nice to make an injured man spend the night on her couch."

He remembered waking up in her bed, surrounded by the smell of her; the shampoo she wore in her hair, the perfume left on her skin when she lay down for the night. Reminders of her. And again, his memory's tease—her voice whispering 'love you' in his ear. But it had to be a dream; she was a cop, he was wanted. There was no way. "I woke up in her bed…"

"Well, there you go!" Sam said triumphantly, a smile lighting up her face.

"…and Joss slept on her couch." He looked sideways at the crestfallen look on Sam's face, and smiled sarcastically. "You didn't honestly think anything would have happened, do you? I'm not her type."

"And just what, exactly, do you think is her 'type'?" Sam challenged, turning to face him. "Let's get this straight right now. Why do you think she doesn't like you?"

"She likes me. But we're just friends, Sam." A warning note crept into his voice, telling her this conversation was over.

She either didn't catch it, or she ignored it. Probably ignored it, knowing her. "Sure could have fooled me. Looks to me like she likes you. A lot. Wouldn't mind getting to know you a bit better."

He refused to rise to the bait. "We're just friends, Sam."

His phone buzzed, indicating an incoming text message. Before he could reach down to the seat and pick it up (he'd lost his earpiece somewhere in the scuffle the night before) Sam had grabbed it. "From Carter," she announced, and the triumphant note in her voice warned him that he was in trouble as she started reading the message. "'Don't forget to bring a couple spare changes of clothing, John. If this happens again you'll at least have clothes that fit. And remember to bring Paul's shirt back.'" Sam looked at him. "That's her husband's shirt you're wearing?"

"Ex-husband." He winced internally at the defensiveness in his voice. "Taylor found it and gave it to me."

"And now she wants you to bring a couple extra changes of clothing and leave it at her house. Just friends, hmm?" The phone buzzed again, and Sam stared at the screen for a moment…and then collapsed laughing.

"What?" He glared at Sam. She just leaned back in the seat and laughed harder. He finally grabbed the phone from her and read the screen.

Joss had texted: _I'm going to buy stock in the company that makes your white shirts._

_*******scene break******_

Sam left John on the sidewalk outside his apartment building with no further ribbing about his night with Joss. It wasn't until he saw who was in his apartment that he remembered something he never should have forgotten; Zoe and Sam worked on him as a team. If one of them had given up on a topic, it just meant that the other was in a position to take up the attack.

Zoe sprawled indulgently on his bed, her hair tousled, clothes in a pile on the floor at the foot. Which meant she wasn't wearing anything underneath the sheet she was lying under. A year ago he understood that for what it was; a blatant invitation to indulge.

And a year ago he would have accepted the invitation.

But something held him back now, and he didn't know what it was. A part of him sat up and took notice as Zoe shrugged off the dark red sheet and rose up out of the bed, completely nude. Her fair skin contrasted with the deep crimson, and yet, for some reason, the greater part of him just wasn't interested. "Good morning, Zoe," he said carefully.

"Sam said you'd spent the night at Joss's after an injury. She seemed to think it was a perfect opportunity for you to make a move, but I know better." He sat down on the edge of his bed to take off his shoes, and she sat down behind him, pressing her body up against his back, an arm around his neck. An even more blatant invitation, especially when he felt the tiny nubs of her nipples through the too-thin, too-tight t-shirt.

He stood abruptly, grabbing the ends of the shirt and stripping it off, and Zoe sat back, smiling victoriously, no doubt thinking she'd succeeded. Instead, John got up, went to his dresser, and took out one of his own casual t-shirts, shrugging into it, and headed for the kitchenette to make some more coffee. Zoe frowned, and the next thing he knew, she was pressed up against his back, still nude.

"Zoe, I'm not in the mood." And even as he said it, he knew it was true. Something had changed in the last year, and suddenly sex with her, their 'friends with benefits' arrangement, no longer held any attraction for him. He couldn't even explain why; he wasn't in any committed relationships, had no steady other—not that that would have even been possible with the current 'job' he had with Harold; and Zoe herself hadn't changed, still lean and tanned, exactly as she'd been when he'd first gotten acquainted with her years ago, with her supermodel body. No, Zoe herself hadn't changed.

He was the one who'd changed.

"I'm starting to get that. Any particular reason why?" She leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded over her chest, which formerly would have been completely disarming as the position pushed her bare breasts up to a distracting degree, but for some reason was having no effect on John now.

"I had a rough night last night." He held up his arms, still wrapped in the bandages Joss had placed there the previous night and which Sam had replaced after pronouncing her satisfaction with Joss's handiwork that morning.

"I heard. And usually you like a little stress relief after a rough night." He didn't answer, so she shifted from the subtle dancing around the topic and got straight to the point of her line of questioning. "All right, John, let's be completely blunt. Nothing's going to happen today."

"No." Definitely not.

"Or anytime in the near future."

"Define 'near future'." He poured himself a cup of coffee, not meeting her eyes. Black, strong. Just the way Joss liked it. Funny how they both liked their coffee the same way. Zoe liked hers with sugar and cream. Heavy on the sugar. He'd tasted it once—so sweet it made his teeth curl.

She looked at him penetratingly. "As long as Joss Carter's an item."

"Joss is not an 'item'." Even he knew how defensive that sounded…and what it said about what he actually thought, his own words notwithstanding.

"The only reason she isn't an item is because you're not willing to take that first step," Zoe challenged, stepping away from the counter, going to the end of the bed and starting to pull her clothes on. Black lacy underwear and bra, black slacks, pale sweater. Normally he loved watching her get dressed; for some reason, now, though, all he could think of was whether his socks had been clean when Joss pulled them off his feet the night before. "I've seen the way you both look at each other. It's damn obvious, John. And even if I were deaf, dumb and blind, which I'm not, it would still be obvious."

He braced her over the rim of his coffee cup, ice in his blue eyes. He didn't want to discuss Joss with Zoe; not at all. "And just what do you see as being so obvious?"

"You're focused on her when she walks into a room, no matter how you try to hide it. I saw the way you looked the night we went out to Blur. Even Sam noticed, and Sam's dense as a brick. Your sniping at her was so much more obvious than if you'd simply given into what you were thinking and commented on Joss's dress. I never thought you liked girls Joss's type, but people change, don't they?" She slipped her feet into her heeled black leather boots, ones that he used to think made her legs look longer. He used to like those legs.

"Yes, people change." _I've changed_. And he had no idea when, or even why, it had happened.

Zoe paused in front of him, searched his face, looking intently at him. He looked back at her steadily. For the sake of the relationship they had formerly shared, he did owe her some honesty, but he couldn't force words out past his lips.

Apparently it wasn't necessary; whatever she saw in his face answered the question in her eyes, and she reached past him, grabbed her purse off the counter. "I won't disturb you with my presence any further." No rancor, no anger, and that was somehow worse than if she'd shouted and thrown things.

"Zoe…"

She stopped, faced him. "No hard feelings, John. I'm not the one you want, and you're no longer content to settle for whoever you can get. It's nothing to feel bad about; you're getting older and you're no longer looking for just the physical gratification. You've gotten some emotional maturity and you're looking for something a bit deeper than passing fancy, or a moment's satisfaction." She smiled, and he understood; she really wasn't angry, and there really were no hard feelings; she was looking for something very superficial, and he…well, he wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn't going to find it in Zoe Morgan. Or with Zoe Morgan. She wasn't looking for anything but physical gratification; if she didn't find it with him, she would find it with someone else. Of that he was certain.

She leaned in, gave him a kiss on the cheek that had no heat, no passion, no desire, and he knew he was going to miss her. He wasn't going to miss her enough to ask her to stay, not now; he'd changed, moved past that. But he was going to miss what they'd had, if only in a very small way. "Thank you, Zoe," he said, and meant it.

The look she gave him said she knew very well what he was thanking her for. "You're welcome, John." No other words needed to be said. The look that passed between them encompassed memories of the long nights they' spent in each other's arms, the passions they'd gratified, the adventure they'd shared. No regrets, on either side. Just another turn of the page, another chapter of his life, and hers, over; and although he didn't know what lay on the next page, he knew it was time to see what the future held. "I'm still your friend, though. Call me if you need me."

He nodded, and she smiled, shrugged her purse onto her shoulder, and headed for the door. Just before her hand touched the knob, she stopped, as if thinking, for a long moment; then she turned and came back.

"I don't know if you even know what you're looking for, John. I can see it, Sam can see it, I'll bet Harold can see it. You, and _her_, are the only ones who can't seem to see it." She paused, then smiled grimly. "Actually, I'm betting _she_ can see it, but that damn sense of honor and fairness she has won't let her ask for something that you haven't offered first. She'll never make the first move, John."

John stared at her. He couldn't think of anything to say. He didn't even have to ask Zoe who she was talking about. They both knew.

"For all that sass she carries around, she's incredibly shy when it comes to her own feelings, when it comes to expressing and asking for what _she_ wants. She doesn't hesitate when it comes to the needs of someone or something she cares about—her son, her partner, even her job—but in case you hadn't noticed it, she never asks anything for _herself_. When she calls you, it's never 'I want to talk' it's 'can you help this victim whose case I'm working on.' So if you're waiting for her to make the first move, you're going to be waiting forever."

"She's very selfless." Even he'd noticed that.

Zoe stepped close. "What you and I do is dangerous. Our lives can end at any moment. But _we choose_ to do that, we _choose_ to take that risk. We know death is only a breath, a bullet, away. She does this because it's a part of her and who she is, an integral part of her mental makeup. She didn't choose this; it chose her. She didn't have any say in the matter."

Every word Zoe said felt like a revelation to John. Not new exactly; much of what she was saying were things he'd observed for himself, but only in a very general way. He'd never examined feelings and emotions, even his own; they weren't his 'thing'; he was always more comfortable with bullets and guns.

"Risk is something she accepts as a part of what she is. But I don't know if _you've_ accepted that, if _you've_ realized that she could die, today, on the streets, trying to protect someone else, someone she probably doesn't even know. I don't think you've admitted, even to yourself, how important she is to you."

Zoe's voice dropped, and her eyes drilled him with an intensity he'd never seen in her before. "Make the best of every moment you have, John. Give her the opening you both are looking for, because if something happens to her before you have a chance to tell her how you feel, you're going to lose yourself."

* * *

_EDIT 1/12/2013: In looking over the reviews for this chapter I realized I'd failed to get readers to understand what I see inside my head. Because I omitted a chapter that I initially felt wasn't relevant to the novel but that I think will clarify for readers why Zoe just said what she did to John. It'll also help understand them later on down the line in the second half of the novel. So have a peek at the companion short story/songfic I titled 'Ask' and see what you think._

_Oh, and hey...lookee, the line insert thing worked! Thanks for everyone who PM'd me and let me know how this works!_


	11. Chapter 11: Killer

**Chapter 11: Killer**

_Author's Note: when I started writing this novel, I seriously didn't mean for this to turn into a crossover. Really. I swear. But the inevitable result of having so many different characters living in my head and writing for so many different fandoms is that sometimes characters from one fandom invite characters from another fandom to play, and hey, I'm just the typist; they tell me their story, I just type it. _

_So anyone who's read my previous writings will remember Tony Walker from Book 2 of my last quartet of novels, the novel titled G.I. Joe: SERE. When you last saw him in that novel, he was headed to Leavenworth (military prison) for rape, assault, and battery. This tells you what happened when he got out. If you haven't read it, I can recommend that whole series while you're waiting for more chapters of 'Catalyst', since some of the characters from that G. /L&O:SVU crossover are going to pop up in later chapters of this novel. If military black-ops novels really aren't your thing, well, I can understand that, and I think I've put enough detail in those upcoming chapters –Chapter 19 will be your first formal introduction—for you to get the gist of what happened._

_And now, on with the story!_

"We have a name, Mr. Reese."

Finch's pronouncement jolted John out of his thoughts. Since he and Zoe had talked three days ago, he hadn't seen either her or Sam—or Joss. She'd been briefly assigned to night shift due to a sudden crime wave that seemed to have gripped New York City, for which additional officers were needed on nights, and he'd been unwilling to disturb her days when she was juggling the need to sleep with being a single Mom.

And he'd also had some heavy thinking to do.

Everything that Zoe had said that morning at his apartment was true; he'd just never realized a lot of it before, not consciously. Joss would never be happy in a nine-to-five, regular office job; it simply wasn't in her. That was why she'd given up law to join the NYPD, even though lawyer's hours would have made being a single mom easier. The life of a police officer, a protector, had been the only avenue open to her after the military; she wouldn't have been able to thrive in any other job. It had chosen her, just as Zoe had said; she hadn't chosen it.

She hadn't consciously chosen to put her life in danger. It had never been a conscious decision, it was something ingrained in her. Although John hated that fate hadn't given Joss a choice, he also understood that it was part of what made her_ Joss Carter_. It had hit John hard, and in the wake of that realization, he'd also understood part of what drove him to obsess over her safety since the first time her number had come up. He hadn't realized it consciously, but he supposed that subconsciously, he'd always known.

He pushed aside those thoughts now and leaned over the table, looking at Finch's computer screen, listening to Finch reading the information displayed there. "Tony Walker. Age, 40, former member of the 75th Ranger Regiment out of Fort Benning, Georgia." Finch read. "Last rank, Corporal; military operating specialty, long-range reconnaissance patrol."

"LRRP," Reese said meditatively. "Expert at survival in hostile conditions, reconnaissance, surveillance and operating secretly forward of the front lines. The 75th is the elite Ranger regiment of the US Army."

Finch nodded in acknowledgement of the information John had provided, and kept reading. "Served time in Leavenworth after a court-martial for rape, assault and battery of a female teammmate; dishonorable discharge after he got out. No known home address; drivers' license expired, no old vehicle registration. No credit cards, no internet footprint, no social media page. No bank account, no electronic transactions."

"But he has a vehicle. The one caked with mud. Can we find out if it has a GPS?"

"It'll take a while to track on visual identification only." Finch sighed.

"Maybe not." Reese was thinking hard. "He's not coming into Manhattan from Long Island or Queens. He has to be living somewhere where there are no cameras—like Shaw said, a wooded, forested State Park seems to be the likeliest guess. And that means he'd be coming in from upstate or western New York—"

"—which are all toll roads. So he has to have stopped and paid a toll somewhere. If we know what tollgate he used we can trace where he came from. Brilliant, Mr. Reese." Finch was typing commands into his computer furiously even as he spoke. "The Machine never gave us a number, so he must have come into town just long enough to kill Dyana Spencer and probably left right away, so we're going to be looking for that mud-caked vehicle up to a day before or a day after her body was discovered. That narrows the timeframe considerably."

"Let me call Carter."

* * *

They were on a coffee break when Carter's phone rang. She looked at the caller ID. Unknown. She took a quick peek—Laskey was still inside the coffeehouse, waiting in line, so she answered the call. "Not too long, John, my rookie's going to be back any second."

"Your suspect is Tony Walker. Ex-Army Ranger from an LRRP attached to the 75th." He knew Carter would understand the significance. "Dishonorable discharge and time in Leavenworth for rape, assault and battery of a female subordinate. Driver's license expired, no known home address, no bank account, no internet footprint, no vehicles registered to him."

"Damn. He really is off-grid and he knows how to survive while off it." Carter cursed.

"Finch is checking all toll roads coming into Manhattan on the day before, the day of, and the day after Spencer's murder. He has to have paid a toll to get in and out. Once we know what toll road he took in, we can trace where he's likely to have come along the highway surveillance cameras."

"Great news, guys. Okay, let me know what you find out. I gotta go, Laskey's coming back." A moment later, the young blond rookie swung into the passenger seat, handing her a cup of coffee as he did so.

"Where to now, partner?" Laskey grinned, and she smiled back at him. She hadn't told Reese and Finch that she'd found out he worked for HR—not yet. But her photo of him talking to Simmons sat in her safe deposit box at the bank, along with the rest of the photographic and video and document evidence she was slowly accumulating.

She wished she could tell the guys what she was doing, get them to help. But some of the ways they had of getting evidence on people weren't quite legal, and if she wanted to bring down HR for what they'd done to Cal, she couldn't risk some key piece of evidence getting thrown out at trial and maybe getting a member of HR off on a technicality. Every scrap of evidence she collected had to be indubitably, unquestionably, legally collected. So she couldn't tell John or Finch what she was doing. They would want to help, and she couldn't risk it.

"So where are we going?" Laskey said, and she realized that while she'd been thinking, she'd started driving.

"I wanna check out the railyard again."

Laskey nodded; since Spencer had been murdered and she'd been transferred to the night shift until this new crime wave subsided, she'd taken to driving by the railyard a couple times a night, just driving by casually. 'Keeping an eye on things', she'd explained to Laskey, and since the whole department knew the Crucifixion Killer had been Carter's cold case, even those who held her in contempt because she'd been broken back to a beat cop understood her drive to get the Killer. No one had commented on her driving past the abandoned rail depot just to check out the crime scene.

And Laskey didn't comment on it now, either, as they pulled into the lot outside the rail depot. She turned off the lights and sat quietly for a time, holding her coffee, looking at the desolate place. "I'd hate for this to be the last thing I ever saw," she said quietly.

"I would too," and she heard a note of sincerity in his voice. She looked at him, was about to ask him a question, when movement out the front passenger window of the squad car caught her attention.

Half-hidden in the shadows of the railyard was an old SUV, a Chevy Blazer at least ten years old, heavily caked with mud. Mud obscured the license plate, and surely there couldn't be two SUVs that heavily muddied in Manhattan? And then, as she watched, a darker-than-night shadow came around the corner of the depot, started to cross the lot to the SUV.

"Hold it right there!" And she turned the spotlight outside the squad car on the figure.

And a chill swept through her.

Massive. A bear of a man, with arms the size of most people's legs. No ski mask, though he was wearing a sleeveless vest, and what she could see of his arms was heavily tattooed. _This is him_, her gut instinct screamed to her. _This is Walker!_ "Hold it right there!" She called out through the car's external speaker. "Raise your hands! Now!"

She and Laskey got out of the car, guns drawn. The guy didn't run, just slowly raised his hands. "What seems to be the problem, Officers?"

"You are. Came to visit the scene of your crime? You reliving the sick thrill you got from killing Dyana Spencer and Annelise Murray?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about, officers," he said smoothly, so quickly that if she didn't absolutely trust Reese and Finch's own unique brand of detective work, she might have believed him. The problem was that she would have to convince others of it. The surveillance video was grainy, showed a tattooed man with a ski mask; only the three of them had seen the reconstructed features from Finch's extrapolation program, and only they knew the guy's name. "What's your name?" She said as she and Laskey approached him.

"Tony Walker," he said, and she felt her tension—and her adrenaline—ratchet up another notch. They had him, and now she just had to be able to keep him until she could prove it.

"Tony Walker. That your vehicle back there, Tony Walker?" she jerked her thumb toward the SUV.

"Yes, it is."

She got him. "Let me see your license." She kept her gun trained on him as he dug into his pocket for his wallet. And yes, Reese and Finch were right—it had expired.

"We're taking you in for trespassing, driving on an expired license and no registration," she said. "Turn around and put your hands behind your back." He hesitated, and she stiffened her arm, a no-nonsense gesture. "Now!"

And he did.

Laskey looked a little surprised as she cuffed him, but she ignored the rookie, focusing her attention on her suspect. He'd killed two women, in the coldest, most gruesome way possible, and she wasn't going to let him out of her sight until he was tucked in a holding cell. Once they had him, she was positive she could figure out what to do, what to say, to keep him in custody until she could convince the rest of the precinct that he was the Crucifixion Killer. One of the easiest, and quickest, ways would be to have his tattoos matched to the tattoos in the surveillance videos. "You're under arrest for driving with an expired license, no registration and no insurance," she ground out through gritted teeth. "Laskey, hand me your handcuffs." His wrists were so huge, arms so big, that it took two pairs of handcuffs to properly secure his wrists behind him.

But he seemed docile, and he got into the back of the car willingly enough, and she felt a rising sense of elation, of victorious accomplishment, as she drove through the streets with a silent rookie and a glowering serial killer in the back of her car.

* * *

"Cut him loose."

Carter stared at Robinson. "What?"

"I said, cut him loose."

"But…" She fumbled helplessly. "Look, can we just keep him for a few more hours?" She'd had the pictures of his tattoos from his arrest and booking photos submitted to a forensic tattoo specialist, who was now comparing them to the tattoos on the Killer on the surveillance tape. It was only a matter of time before the specialist made a match. She couldn't tell Robinson about it now, though; she'd had to forge his signature on the requisition paperwork because as a Detective, it was _his_ job to make those deductive leaps, order those tests. Not hers. Not anymore. Once the specialist made the match, though, Robinson would find out—because he'd get the credit for the discovery. It should have irked her, but it was more important that they keep the Killer from striking again. She was going to keep that promise she'd made to John not to let Robinson under her skin again.

"Carter. Cut. Him. Loose. I know you think he's our killer, and I'll admit it looks suspicious to me too, but we don't have evidence to hold him, and we can't violate his Constitutional rights by holding him without valid charges."

"The hell with his rights, what about Annelise Murray's rights, Dyana Spencer's rights? What about the right of their families to get justice for their murders?" she was aghast. Holding him for a couple more hours wouldn't violate his constitutional rights, but it would guarantee a positive identification. She was as certain of that as she was of her own name.

"_Officer_ Carter!" Robinson's bellow stopped all activity in the squadroom. "We don't have any concrete evidence that he is the killer! I know you think he is, but you're also so eager to close this cold case of yours that you'll see the killer inside every vehicle! We don't have a reason to keep him, cut him loose! That's an order, _Officer_!"

She turned on her heel and stalked away, and as she suspected, her cell phone rang as soon as she was around the corner on her way to the temporary holding cell on the precinct's ground floor. She didn't even have to look at the caller ID to know who was on the other end. "Carter," she said, trying not to let her voice tremble.

"It's all right, Detective Carter," came Finch's voice. "We have eyes on him now. Mr. Reese will keep an eye on him. Ms. Shaw, if you remember, is also quite eager to exact her own form of justice on his person. We know who he is, we have him on our radar, and he will not kill again. Don't get in any more trouble because of him."

"But he's our killer! I can't let a killer walk!" she exclaimed.

"You won't. You're letting him go just long enough for us to gather more concrete proof that he is the Crucifixion killer, and you'll be able to apprehend him as soon as he sets a foot wrong—that is, unless Ms. Shaw gets to him first." At this point Carter was perfectly happy with that possible solution.

"You fellas sure you'll keep an eye on him?"

"Perfectly sure, Detective Carter." And Finch sounded sure.

She fumed as she gestured to the booking officer to open the cell door, and she wasn't too gentle with him as she grabbed his arm and hauled him up off the bench. She didn't speak a word to him until they were outside, until they were standing at the top of the precinct steps and she was juggling the key in her hand. He watched her, expressionlessly.

"I know you did it," she said finally, pinning him with a glare that would have fried him on the spot if her eyes had been lasers. "I know that's you under that ski mask—oh yeah, I saw the surveillance video. I saw what you did. I know it was you. I can't convince everyone else right now, but I will. And when I do I'll come and find you again."

"You got the wrong man, officer. Although I'll say you got balls." He had a very deep bass voice; she'd recognize that voice anywhere if she heard it again.

She snorted as she slowly unlocked her handcuffs. "Like yours? You know what, maybe not. Saw what you did to Dyana Spencer after she was dead. You carrying a condom in your pocket right now? Wonder what size that is, extra-small?"

She unlocked Laskey's handcuffs, looked up at the big man with hate in her eyes. "You don't have balls. Couldn't stand to look in your victim's face while you killed her. Couldn't watch her gasp for air as she choked on her own vomit. Couldn't even watch her pain when you punched her chest. Couldn't look into her dead eyes while you got your rocks off. Had to cover her face and eyes because you couldn't watch her pain when you slashed open her stomach. Yeah, I'll say I got balls. Bigger than yours."

He hissed a breath, took a step toward her. She never moved, never flinched. "Go ahead and assault me, Walker. On a public street, in daylight, with all these cops and civilians around. Go ahead and assault me. Give me a reason to put these cuffs back on you and put you behind bars again. Assaulting a cop is a felony, and I bet that'll tuck you into a cell for long enough for me to find evidence that pins Spencer and Murray's murders on you." She faced him, unflinching; after a moment he took a step back, although he was now glaring at her in hatred. "I'm not scared of you."

"You should be." The words were ground out between gritted teeth.

"Huh? What's that I hear? Are you threatening a cop? I must not have heard you right, you wanna be a guest at Riker's for another week?" She leaned in. "How long do you think it'll take me to find enough evidence to pin on you for those dead girls, expose you as the Crucifixion Killer?"

She was hoping to goad him into doing something stupid, provoking him into attacking her, but after a long moment, he took a step back, gave her a last baleful glare, then strode off down the precinct steps. She palmed her handcuffs and called after him, "I'll be seeing you around, Walker. Soon. Don't get too comfortable. You've killed your last girl!"


	12. Chapter 12: Reciprocity

**Chapter 12: Reciprocity**

"John? M-Mr. Reese? Look I know it's late and all but I really need your help, please?"

John was sitting up and reaching for the light switch in reaction to the panic in the caller's voice before he even consciously processed who the caller was. "Taylor?"

"Um, yeah, it's Taylor, look, Mom went out for a couple of hours and she just got home and she looks really bad but she says she can't go to the hospital." There was pleading in the boy's voice. "Please…I didn't know who else to call."

"It's okay. It's fine." John was already pulling on his jeans. "Is she talking? Responsive?" Because if Joss was unconscious, his next instruction to the boy was going to be for him to call 911 _now_. Joss's life was the most important thing here; whatever had happened to her, whatever she'd done to get herself in…whatever it was…could be sorted out later. She had to be alive for that 'later.'

"Yeah, Mom came home on her own. But her shirt's ruined and I can hear her crying in the bathroom."

So she was responsive and alert. Not in immediate danger then, although John was going to have a couple of words with her about…whatever it was she'd done tonight that panicked Taylor to the point where the boy had felt he needed to call someone for help. Even if she didn't tell him, he'd find out. "I'm on my way. I'm going to disconnect the call now, but call me back immediately if she stops responding to you, or if she seems like she's getting worse."

Reese grabbed for his black motorcycle jacket, helmet and the motorcycle keys. Although it was nearly midnight, and traffic would be fairly light, there were a couple of narrow alleys that the motorcycle would fit down but the GTO wouldn't that would get him to Joss's apartment faster.

He took those alleys at breakneck speed, wondering what the hell she would have gotten herself into that would preclude her going to the hospital but still leave her standing—but still panic her son enough to call him. It couldn't be an attempt on her life by Walker, the Crucifixion Killer; he and Finch had tracked the mud-caked SUV out of Manhattan on a toll road and never saw him reenter it, and highway surveillance cameras had lost the vehicle about an hour out of Manhattan, when the road crossed into New Jersey, two hours after Carter had arrested him and then had to let him go on Detective Robinson's orders. And he hadn't been back since—Finch was watching all the roads carefully for Walker.

So…who else? HR? Although Carter had tried to keep her activities a secret from Finch and Reese, they couldn't help but be aware that she was asking some very pointed questions out on the street, and quietly accumulating a large amount of data. They didn't know what she was doing with that data, had tried hard not to violate the promise they'd made to her to respect her privacy; she'd asked that she be allowed to do this alone, and they'd decided to respect that—to a point. The Machine would give them her number if something she said or did ticked off HR enough for them to go after her with intent to end her life, but Reese knew that Finch was still keeping a quiet eye on her activities.

So maybe…he tapped his earpiece. "Finch."

"I'm here, Mr. Reese." Brisk and businesslike. Apparently Finch hadn't been asleep.

"I got a call from Taylor. He says Carter just came back home from a couple of hours out and she's in pretty bad shape, according to him. I couldn't get much more out of him—he seemed close to panicking—and I decided to head over there to check on her. She told him she couldn't go to a hospital."

"Which means she most likely was doing something not quite legal, and it probably has something to do with her vendetta against HR. Let me see if I can retrace her activities tonight. I'll let you know what I find out."

"Thanks, Finch. Keep Shaw on standby, if Carter's really bad we may need a doctor."

He didn't care that the roar of his motorcycle shattered the quiet of Joss's street; he also didn't pay much attention to where he was parking. And as he raced for her apartment steps, the front door itself opened, and he saw Taylor standing there—the boy must have been watching for him. "Where's Joss?" Reese asked as he stripped off his jacket and helmet and threw them on the nearby sofa.

"She's still in the bathroom. She locked the door. I can hear her in there, she's in a lot of pain but she keeps telling me she's going to be fine." Taylor held out a piece of clothing—a dark turtleneck that John recognized as Carter's; she wore it when she was going out with him, on a venture that involved weapons. But the back of the shirt was shredded, torn, and he could smell the heavy metallic scent of blood.

He crossed the apartment quickly, headed down the short hallway to the bathroom door. He didn't tap right away, he listened for a moment. He could hear her panted, hissed breaths, the sound of someone in pain and desperately trying to control it, most likely in order to not scare her son, who she had to have known was right outside the door disregarding her order for him to go to bed. "That you, Taylor? I told you, I'm fine, I'm just getting cleaned up. Go to bed, you got school tomorrow."

That made up Reese's mind. She didn't sound at all like herself; her words sounded like she was trying to force them out past gritted teeth, and he was also worried about the slight waver in her voice. The flimsy bathroom door lock was no match for his determined strength, and he pushed the door open.

She had been standing with her back to the door, nude from the waist up, her bra in a little hap in the corner of the bathroom. John took in all of that in his peripheral vision; what caught—and held—his attention was the sight of her bare back. Smooth milk chocolate skin was marred by cuts and gashes, some of them deep and leaking blood, and her arms were smeared with it. Her hands were leaving bloody handprints on the bathroom counter too.

"Joss," he breathed as she spun, her hands coming up automatically to clutch a blood-stained towel up to her chest. In the act of turning she lost her grip on the edge of the bathroom counter and her knees buckled. John took a huge step forward, caught her as she fell. "Joss, what happened?"

Her shoulders were shaking; it took a moment for him to realize she was sobbing as he lowered her to the bathroom floor—her shaking legs weren't going to hold her up much longer. And in so doing, he realized why she was bleeding so profusely; there was broken glass in those cuts on her back, glass that was going to have to come out. A distant part of his mind wondered how she'd been planning on doing that herself, with no help, but he resolutely pushed that thought aside.

"I'm going…to strangle him…for calling you." Taylor stood in the bathroom doorway, and he heard her. John saw the hurt look on the boy's face as he stepped in, looking at his mother barely able to sit upright on the tiled floor. "Taylor, I told you not to call John!"

"I didn't know what else to do, Mom," Taylor said, the catch in his voice telling John the boy was on the knife-edge of tears himself. "You look really bad and I was really scared."

"Leave him alone, Joss," John said coolly. He was angry with Joss for having said that; she'd just hurt her son's feelings, but now wasn't the time to address that; they had to take care of Joss first. "He did the right thing." He turned to Taylor. "I'm going to need your help. You gonna be okay?" Joss gave a faint sound of protest, but neither John nor Taylor paid any attention.

"Yeah. What do you need?"

"Tweezers. Washcloth, warm water." How ironic was it that less than three weeks ago they'd all been in this same bathroom, but he'd been the patient and Joss had been the nurse? The boy disappeared, presumably to get the items John requested, and John looked down at Joss. "You have broken glass embedded in your back. What the hell happened tonight, Joss? Why didn't you call me?"

"I couldn't. This was something I had to do alone. You don't need to be here tonight, John."

Anger sharpened his voice even though his hands remained gentle, putting the lid down on the toilet so that she could sit down and lean her upper body on the edge, giving him a better look at her back. "Can't say I agree with you, Joss. This is nasty. What happened?"

She refused to look at him, refused to answer. Anger sharpened his voice, anger borne of concern for her. "Joss. What. Happened."

She remained stubbornly silent. He bit his lip on whatever else he was going to say, inspecting the damage carefully. This was regular glass, not the tempered safety stuff used almost everywhere nowadays; this glass had shattered into slivers and fragments, although there were larger chunks that bled more profusely. He had no idea how she'd managed to get herself from…wherever this had happened—to her apartment. He reached out, touched a sliver that didn't seem to be that bad but was bleeding more heavily than the others, and was rewarded with a sobbed cry from Joss. There was more of the glass beneath her skin—a sizable piece, and she was definitely hurting. "How were you planning on getting these fragments out of your back, Joss?"

She shrugged—and winced at the pain that caused. He watched as a cut that had clotted around a small fragment broke open and started bleeding again, and cursed. "Damn it. Every time you move you start bleeding again. Joss, why the hell didn't you call me?" He'd spent the evening at the gym—by himself—sharpening his skills on the video game system, and had briefly considered calling Joss to meet him there with Taylor so he'd have a gaming partner. And while he'd been playing games, she'd been...well, he had no idea what she really _had_ been doing, but he sure as hell was going to find out. With or without her help. If he had to find out without her help, he was going to be pissed.

His earpiece crackled to life. "Mr. Reese?"

He tapped it. "I'm at Joss's place, Finch. She's determined not to go to the hospital, and we can take care of it here, but she looks pretty bad. I'll call you when I'm done." Without waiting for Finch's reply he disconnected the call.

Taylor came back with the items he'd requested, and John set grimly to work. Nothing that was going to need Shaw or even a hospital, if she was really determined not to go—but there was no way she'd have been able to do all of this herself. He saw several bloody slivers on the bathroom counter, realized she'd given it a try, but he also realized that her fumbling attempts to care for this herself had only exacerbated the situation.

Every gasp of pain she let out made him feel worse. Every cry as he pulled a larger fragment out of her skin sharpened his anger. Taylor's silent, wide-eyed support, changing the water in the bowl several times, rinsing the washcloth John was using on Joss's back, and bringing a small bowl for John to drop each piece of extracted glass into, was invaluable, and John was glad for the boy's presence and assistance.

Joss stayed silent during the operation, seemed to have accepted the fact that he wasn't leaving. She stopped trying to protest, argue, although that could also have been partly from blood loss and exhaustion. And the fact that every time she opened her mouth to say something, he responded with a coldy angry, 'What happened?' which she plainly didn't want to answer.

By his count, he extracted nearly fifteen slivers of glass from her back in the hour that followed. Joss tried to stay stoic and silent, but pain was a cumulative thing, and by the time he was nearly done—all except the largest piece, deeply embedded just under her left shoulder blade—she was crying.

He hated hearing her cry. He hated hearing her whimpers, hated seeing the way her body shivered with pain. And what fueled his temper even more at her stubbornness was when the pain grew too much and she had to beg him to stop. "Please, John," she choked, her shoulders shaking. "Please…stop…just for a moment, it hurts…" her voice was a raspy whisper from the crying she was doing, and he sat back, swallowing hard at the pain she was enduring. Pain she wouldn't have had to endure if she'd _just…called…him_.

"Just one more, Joss. There's a deep one, right under your shoulder blade. I don't know how deep it goes, and it's going to hurt coming out."

"Just for a moment…" She was swaying even from her sitting position, and he had a feeling she was going to pass out soon. She'd been clutching the towel to her chest, hiding her breasts from sight, but she was losing her grip on that and he'd seen a few cuts on her upper chest too. Probably the location where she'd extracted the first few slivers of glass from—and the thought of Joss pulling fragments of glass from her chest made him angry all over again.

He'd been gradually figuring a few things out during this operation. The glass slivers he'd been pulling out of her skin were mostly clear, but mixed in had been some green, blue and brown glass. And one of them had a mangled paper adhesive label on it. Beer bottles. He was convinced now that she'd been in a fight at a bar somewhere; the question was why she'd been there, where was it, and damn it, _why_ had she not gone to a hospital? Did she start it, or had she just gotten caught up in it?

"Okay, last one, and then I'll take a look at your front before we bandage you up." She had plenty of first aid supplies—Taylor had silently opened the cabinet under the bathroom sink and pulled out a large box containing bandage rolls, gauze, butterfly closures, and he'd determined that was everything he needed.

"No…not looking at…my chest." Still stubborn.

To hell with her stubbornness. "Yes I am, Joss, and I don't think you're in any condition to prevent me." He sighed. "Brace yourself, Joss, this one's going to be bad." And he grabbed the visible portion of the sliver of glass with the tweezers and pulled.

She did pass out.

She crumpled to the bathroom floor with the towel still clutched to her chest, and he sighed as he gently turned her partly over on her side to check the location from where he'd just pulled the nearly three-inch long chunk of glass. She was bleeding, but not badly. After a moment's thought, he carefully eased her upper body back to a position leaning against the toilet seat, then applied two butterfly closures to that gash. The others were relatively superficial and hadn't bled after he took the fragments out; he just wanted to bandage the area and protect her skin from any further damage that might be caused by inadvertent movement.

"Can you turn around, Taylor? Just for a moment," he asked, and the boy turned his back. John carefully pulled the towel away from Joss's chest, looking down. He forced himself to ignore his purely male reaction at seeing an attractive female form, and survey her with professional detachment. A few small cuts, nothing major, and she had extracted the glass from that area before he'd arrived. What caught his attention was a large, very distinctive scar on her lower rib cage, just above the waistband of her slacks. A shrapnel wound—the scar pattern was very distinctive to an old war veteran like himself—and from the radiating scar lines, from a landmine. _Jesus, Joss,_ he thought to himself, staring at what must have, at the time it happened, been a gaping hole in her side.

And again he remembered Zoe's words. _This life chose her. She didn't have any say in the matter._

All the more reason to consider her an absolute idiot for not having called him this evening. Damn it, she _didn't_ have to do this herself, why couldn't she understand that? Why couldn't she understand that if she wanted his help, all she had to do was ask? Why didn't she understand that he wanted to help—no, when it came to her, he _needed_ to help, although he could never tell her that?

He sighed. "Taylor—no, don't turn around—can you get another shirt for your Mom? Soft, comfortable, nothing bulky? I'm going to bandage her back and chest now and then I'll get her to bed." The boy nodded and disappeared.

By the time Taylor came back with a flannel button-down shirt—something soft, shapeless, lightweight and warm, which was important to John because Joss's skin was cold—John had taped gauze pads over her shoulders and back, and a small one over the cuts on her chest. Elastic bandages wrapped around her upper ribcage, keeping those gauze pads in place, and then he'd draped a towel over her shoulders. Taylor handed him the shirt and tuned his back without being asked, and John carefully got Joss dressed, buttoned the shirt, then carried her unconscious form from the bathroom to her bedroom and tucked her in.


	13. Chapter 13:Argument

**Chapter 13: Argument**

Taylor was in the bathroom silently cleaning Joss's bloody handprints off the counter when John got back. John gathered up the towels, dropping them in the hamper; dropped her ruined shirt in the wastebasket, and then wiped her blood off the floor. He took the bowl with the glass fragments into the kitchen, Taylor trailing behind him, and carefully emptied them, still sticky with Joss's blood, into a plastic grocery bag, then double bagged it before putting it in the trashcan. "I don't want your Mom to get hurt again when she takes the trash out."

Taylor nodded, and didn't speak again until John had washed his hands and was drying them on her kitchen towel. "I'm sorry I called you, Mr. Reese."

"Call me John. And don't be sorry. I'm not." John folded his arms, leaned against the kitchen counter, and gave the boy his undivided attention. "I'm glad you thought to call me. That's not something your Mom would have been able to handle herself, no matter what she thought. She would have missed something, and then she _would_ be in the hospital. With an infection."

"She told me not to call you. That's when I figured you would be the best one to call. I knew you would help." The boy's relieved smile was punctuated by a yawn. "All right. I have school today so I should go to bed."

"Taylor." John's voice stopped the boy on his way out of the kitchen, and he turned back to John. "I told your Mom, a long time ago, if she needs anything, all she has to do is call me. I'm going to tell you that now, too. Whatever you need, if you're in trouble, if Joss—your Mom—is in trouble. I realize she's not too good about doing that herself, so if your common sense is telling you that she's in over her head—like tonight—please let me know." He thought for a moment, then decided what the hell. "Even if it's not trouble, if it's something simple—I'm still here for you both."

"I know you told her that a while ago. I told her that when she came home. She said she didn't want to bother you."

"It's not a bother."

"I know. I tried to tell her that you like her, so it's not a bother, but she wouldn't listen." He saw John's look, and with the perceptiveness and bluntness of the young, he said artlessly, "You like Mom. She likes you. I don't understand why she won't admit that she likes you." Earnest brown eyes looked a John. "You don't have another girlfriend, do you?"

"No." John had to force the words out. "I just broke up with Zoe Morgan." It was the only way he could describe it; he didn't know how to explain to Taylor that Zoe hadn't been a 'girlfriend' and it hadn't been a real 'breakup'—they'd simply ended a longstanding arrangement.

Taylor shrugged. "Then I don't see what's the problem."

John found his voice. "You don't have a problem with this? Me liking your Mom?"

Frank brown eyes full of honest puzzlement met his blue ones. "Should I? I guess there was a time when I thought I wanted Dad and Mom back together, but Mom's a lot happier now Dad's not…around. They…didn't really get along well right before Mom decided we had to leave. Now Dad's got a new girlfriend, but Mom still doesn't have anyone. I thought she liked Mr. Cal for a while, they had a couple of dates, but I didn't really like him. Mom liked him but not really_ liked _him. Not like she likes you." He sighed. "I guess it's an adult thing?"

John seized gratefully on that. "Yes. It's an 'adult thing'."

Taylor shrugged…and yawned again. "Oh well. I guess it's like Mom says, I'll figure it out when I get older. Good night, John."

Alone in the kitchen, John thought about what he'd inadvertently learned. So despite his thinking that she'd been serious about Cal Beecher, it hadn't been. Taylor called him 'Mr. Cal' but he called John 'John'. Cal had never been on informal terms with Joss's son, then—and that spoke volumes about how intimate their relationship had really been.

John wandered out into the living room, looked at the pictures on the mantelpiece—slightly dusty. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Joss was a busy woman, and a little dust wasn't all that important. The picture inside was of Joss and Taylor, taken when the boy was about twelve; and Cal, in a frame next to them. Why had he never noticed it was a formal police department personnel photo, not something taken between friends in an informal setting? Her relationship with Cal Beecher had been friendly, yes, but not personal.

He stretched out on the couch, still thinking about it.

* * *

When he opened his eyes again, it was morning. Taylor was trying to creep stealthily around the apartment, trying to move quietly while he got ready for school; hopeless, because John was alert to movements from people who were trying to be unheard. Sneaking around him would be the best and fastest way to wake him up.

He stopped Taylor on the way out the door and insisted the boy wear a jacket; Taylor rolled his eyes but complied, and John poured his first cup of coffee as he wondered at the strangeness of the world. He'd never seen himself as the domestic type, never seen himself worrying about whether a boy wore a jacket to school—yet it seemed natural to be here, watching over Taylor while Joss slept.

Ten minutes later, he was glad that the boy had chosen to go off to school earlier; God only knew what Shaw would think of to say if she saw him telling Taylor to 'put a coat on, it's going to be cold.' As it was, Shaw simply raised an eyebrow as she saw him, standing shoeless in the kitchen with coffee, but refrained from asking. Instead, she followed behind John as he led the way into the bedroom. Joss was just stirring, moaning a little at the pain in her back and shoulders, and John quietly closed the door to the bedroom as Sam Shaw started unbuttoning Joss's shirt, no doubt to look at the damage.

His earpiece crackled to life. "Mr. Reese?"

Hearing Finch's voce reminded him of his broken promise—that he would call Finch and let him know what Joss's condition was when he was done. He tapped the earpiece to connect the call. "Sorry, Finch. I forgot I was supposed to call you and let you know how she was doing." Because she was Harold's friend too.

"It's all right, Mr. Reese, I was able to retrace Joss's steps last night. I understand why you reacted the way you did." A soft sigh. "I also understand why she said she couldn't go to the hospital."

"Well, enlighten me, Finch, because I still don't understand."

"I'll be very brief. HR was looking for her last night and if she'd gone to the hospital she might be dead now."

"The Machine didn't give us her number." John stared at nothing as he digested this fact. "How could they be looking for her if the Machine didn't see she was in danger and give us her number?"

"They weren't looking for Detective Carter specifically; they were looking for an armed assailant they thought was Russian who assaulted one of HR's couriers and stole his money. The courier was attacked when he stopped at a local bar for a couple of drinks. He was gunned down by an assailant who spoke Russian, stole the money and ran. The assailant, as you've no doubt guessed, was Joss Carter."

"Joss is starting a war between the Russians and HR?" He hadn't thought about that. The body count would be horrendous on both sides. And the head of HR would no doubt have to surface—unless Joss already knew who the head of HR was and was constructing her plan around trying to get that person to reveal himself.

"Apparently so, Mr. Reese."

"Damn." He couldn't hide the smile. "I never thought Joss Carter was that…devious." A well-crafted, elegant plan, but simple enough to pull off. "So how would they have pegged her for the assailant who killed the HR courier if she'd gone to the hospital?"

Harold's tone was icy with anger—anger that John shared when he heard Finch's next words. "During the scuffle an HR thug grabbed Detective Carter and body-slammed her on top of a table full of beer bottles and drinking glasses." So the colored glass he'd pulled out of Joss's back last night _had_ been from broken beer bottles.

John wanted to curse Joss out for endangering her own life pulling this stunt.

Reese regretted that he hadn't been invited to the party—he would have enjoyed doing this, could have come up with a few more creative ways to do it, too.

But both the killer named 'Reese' and the man named 'John' were thoroughly pissed at Joss Carter.

"They had a bulletin out at the local hospitals for someone who came in with glass shards in their back and shoulders. While they were specifically looking for a male—no doubt underestimating the 'fairer sex' and the damage that a very determined woman like Joss Carter can cause—if she had gone to a hospital she would certainly have come to their attention. She might not now be alive."

"Thank you for that information, Finch," John said, then turned as he heard voices. Sam was coming down the hallway with Joss next to her. Joss looked tired, but was moving almost normally and it would only have been evident to someone who knew her very well that she was injured. "I'm going to have a talk with our Detective Carter." He didn't bother disconnecting the call; he didn't care if Finch heard this conversation. "Why are you starting a war between HR and the Russians?"

Sam Shaw wore a look that said 'I'm not getting in the middle of this' as she left Joss at the kitchen island and left the apartment. Neither John nor Joss noticed her leave. John repeated, "Why are you starting a war between HR and the Russians?"

Joss headed for the kitchen counter and poured herself a cup of coffee. "Good morning to you, John."

"Damn it, Joss, don't change the subject!" John slapped his coffee cup down on the counter a little harder than was strictly necessary. "What you did last night was stupid. Going out on your own doing this was stupid. The only smart thing you did last night was leave your phone where Taylor could get at it and call me."

"Yeah. After I specifically told him not to. I'm gonna have a talk with him about that."

"No, you're not." John's voice held a dangerous edge to it. "Taylor did what he did to protect his mother when she didn't even try to protect herself. Don't you dare yell at him for it."

"John Reese, you are _not _going to tell me how to raise my son!" She was getting angry now.

"I will when I see you hurting the boy's feelings because he tried to help you after you did something stupid. Which brings me back to my original question. Why are you starting a war between HR and the Russians?"

"You upset? Why? Because I didn't invite you?" Sarcasm dripped from her voice.

"Yes, I'm upset." The counter rattled as John slapped a hand down on it. "You're not doing this, Joss." He was going to have to talk some sense into her.

"Doing what? Let's just get this straight, John. What is it I'm not supposed to do?" A moment. "Or is this really 'what is it that John Reese isn't going to let me do'?" She stepped up to him, facing him with anger flashing in her eyes. "I got news for you, _Mister_ Reese, I've been doing this longer than you have. I don't need your permission to do anything. I can take care of myself."

"Yes, like you took care of yourself last night," he shot back. "Tell me again, just how were you planning on getting that glass out of your back? By yourself? Were you going to get Taylor to help you? What do you think that would have done to him, watching you pass out on the floor in front of him?" Why did the woman have to be so…damn stubborn?

"I'm not discussing my son with you." There was a slight defensive note in her voice—she knew he was right, but she didn't want to admit it. "I didn't have any right to ask for your help last night, and neither did he. Neither one of us has a right to ask you for anything you're not willing to give."

"Wait a minute. Is that what you really think, Joss, that you and Taylor have no right to ask me for anything?" He felt stunned even as Zoe's words ran through his head again. _That damn sense of honor and fairness she has won't let her ask for something you haven't offered first._ "Even help? What are friends for, Joss? Three weeks ago you and Taylor patched me up as I was bleeding on your bathroom floor. Where's that quid-pro-quo that's so important to you, Joss? Is that only one way?"

"That's different, John!" She turned away angrily—and winced as her shoulder pulled on the bandages.

He saw the wince. For some reason, it made him even angrier. "Well then, Detective Carter, if you don't think you have a right to ask me for help then I guess I don't have a right to be standing in your kitchen watching you suffer." Seeing her in pain was hurting him. Every wince, every movement she made that suddenly stopped because she felt the pull of bandages on her back was hurting him, and it was taking all of his effort not to take her back to her bedroom and lock her in until she came to her senses. He grabbed his jacket and helmet from the couch and headed for the door.

It closed so softly behind him it was an insult.

* * *

Joss felt the tension deflate from her shoulders as John walked out—and as she relaxed, the cuts on her back reminded her of last night. "Damn it," she said angrily, her eyes stinging with tears. He was right, and she was wrong, but something he'd said, the way he said it, had gotten her pissed. 'You're not doing this, Joss.'

She sagged against the counter. She didn't owe him anything, he didn't owe her anything. They had no right to demand anything of each other—and she knew that, with Taylor calling John last night, that's essentially what last night was—a demand for him to help her, as she'd helped him a few weeks ago. And that was exactly what she'd been trying to avoid—no demands, no requests for assistance that he couldn't say 'no' to. Taylor calling him last night had forced him to help her out of a sense of duty, a sense of reciprocity.

His words 'you're not doing this, Joss' had been a hint that he'd been backed into a situation where he didn't really want to get involved but hadn't had a choice. She was thankful for his help, and she knew that Taylor had done what he did because he was worried about her and didn't know what else to do—and that was also her own fault, for backing her own son into a corner where he'd had to disobey her in order to get help. She should have never gone out last night; she'd been angry, frustrated and chafing at the restrictions of being a beat cop when she'd gotten used to the freedom of being a detective, and truth to tell, when she'd left the house last night she'd felt a bit of angry anticipation at what she was about to do; to strike a blow, however indirect, at the organization that was responsible for her current situation. HR.

Now in the harsh light of day, and with the throbbing in her back to remind her of what she'd done, she knew she'd been impulsive and reckless. She should have planned, should have thought. At least she should have worn a vest when she went out, it would have protected her from the glass fragments. Now her son was upset with her, she was upset with herself, and worst of all, that easy friendship she shared with John was over. Now he probably saw her as manipulative, creating a situation where he would have to get involved in a private feud that had nothing to do with him, Finch, or their crusade.

And in the process she'd lost one of the few people she could call a 'best friend'. Because in the last couple of months she'd been feeling something starting to shift in her relationship with John Reese. The first time she'd seen him, after the fight on the subway, she'd thought that he'd be rather nice-looking if he got cleaned and dressed decently. She almost hadn't recognized him the first time she saw him after Harold Finch took him in; clean, neatly dressed, the handsome planes of his face now clearly evident and not hidden under an unruly mess of unkempt beard. After he'd been wounded during the confrontation with Donnelly on the garage roof, and she had found them outside, Harold struggling to get John into his black Lincoln, she'd helped Harold get John into the car and then let them get away—the first, though not the last, time she'd broken a rule to help him. At that time she'd started seeing him as something different; not a fugitive from the law, but a man trying to satisfy Justice outside the bounds of the law. As she'd told Donnelly in the car that evening, John was, simply, a good man. He was a complicated person under a simple description.

But in the last couple of months, she'd started to see more of the man behind that badass persona—she didn't know when those perceptions started changing, but she knew when she became aware of it: the night in the gym, sparring with him on the mat. At that moment he'd crossed from being a 'friend' to something more, something deeper.

And she'd hoped…oh, how she'd hoped!...that maybe, someday, he'd see her as a best friend too. Although she definitely wouldn't mind getting him in her bed—she was intensely aware of his maleness every time he was in her personal space—she knew there was no way in hell she could compete with exotic, beautiful Zoe Morgan, or even Sam Shaw, fully John's equal in the badass department. She'd tried to console herself with thoughts of him being her friend, enjoying the time they spent together, whether it was at the gym or shooting up an illegal gambling room.

And now it was all gone. Because of her stupidity.

"Damn it, John," she said into the silence of her apartment, voice breaking. "I'm sorry."

The silence was her only answer.


	14. Chapter 14: Discussion

**Chapter 14: Discussion**

John knew Harold had been listening, but the other man didn't break the silence until John was on his motorcycle heading back to his apartment. "She didn't deny the accusation that she's starting a war between HR and the Russians."

John barked a short, sardonic laugh. "After last night, that's all you can say, Finch?"

"I'm not good at interpersonal relationships, John. And especially not the relationship between yourself and Joss Carter. Neither of you fit into any psychosocial relationship category I'm familiar with." Yeah, and seeing as how Harold spent a lot of his time (before he recruited John) trying to figure out what made people do the random, horrible crazy things they did to each other, he'd have had a lot of insight into human psychology. "Both of you are very strong-willed and resent any intrusion into your lives, resist anything that you perceive as trying to make you do something that you don't want to do. And you reflect that on each other. Detective Carter tries to avoid calling on us, for anything, because she doesn't want to be placed in a situation where she'll be compelled to do something she doesn't really want to do…and she reflects that on you, believing you to be the same way since you are very much like her."

"Are we?" John asked. "Then why can't she understand that I'm offering my help because I want to, because I care about her, not because I feel like I owe her—or she owes me?"

"Have you ever told her that?" The simple question made John freeze as he considered that. "Have you ever told her, John, that you offer her your help because you care about her, for herself? Or do you think it's possible that she thinks you help her because she helps you, and you're simply protecting a valuable source of information?" A pause. "Have you told her that you're in love with her?"

"I'm not—" the denial was automatic; he started saying it before he consciously processed what Harold was saying. And he remembered what Zoe had said: _I can see it, Sam can see it, I bet even Harold can see it._ Was he really that transparent?

And more importantly, was he in love with Joss?

He'd been in love with Jessica. Losing her had damn near killed him, made him lose himself. He didn't feel for Joss the same thing he'd felt for Jessica, though. This was somehow deeper, more familiar. More intimate even though he and Joss hadn't touched each other yet, hadn't kissed. Not that he hadn't thought about it, but he just couldn't tell her how he felt. "I can't tell her that, Harold."

The fact that he didn't deny it, after that first startled knee-jerk reaction, must have told Harold what the other man wanted to know. "Why, John?" Harold's voice was very, very quiet on the other end of the line. "Why _can't_ you tell her?"

And that rocked John again. Why indeed? What was keeping him back? "Joss went out with Cal Beecher—"

"—which you just found out from Taylor wasn't serious. She misses him, yes, but he wasn't as comfortable with her—and Taylor—as you are. Taylor calls you by your first name. He didn't call Mr. Beecher by his first name." Of course Finch would have been listening. "Are you afraid she doesn't care about you?"

He had to consider that too. Was he? The answer was an immediate 'yes'. He cared about her and cared what she thought of him. And suddenly the situation struck him as being incredibly funny, in a slightly sad way. He'd never had problems getting girls to look at him, and like him. He'd used that as a weapon, sometimes. He'd never really cared what they thought of him, either. Jessica was the first woman he'd consciously cared about whether she loved him, and he'd lost her through his own actions.

But if he'd had Jessica, would he have ever known Joss? Would he have ever met her? So many things had happened, in both Joss's life and his—had any of those events ended differently he and Joss might never have met. If Joss had died from that landmine whose scar she carried around with her now, he would never have met her. If he'd done what he thought about doing four years ago and ended his life before he got into the fight on the subway, he would never have met her; he would have been a random homeless man who committed suicide. If he hadn't been there to save her life the first time the Machine gave Harold her number, who wouldn't be alive today? How many lives had she saved because he'd saved hers? Had he saved her life first, or had she saved his?

And because of this, didn't he owe her the truth, at least? "She's not just another number."

"I know she isn't. Not to you. I've known that since her number came up the first time. But does _she_ know that? Does she know that, to you, she's not just another number, that she's not just another in a long line of women? Does she know that, to you, she's not just a source of information, a confidential informant like Lionel, but a valued and valuable part of your life? Does she know how much she means to you?"

He couldn't answer Harold's questions—because he'd never told her that that was what she meant to him. He realized now why she'd said what she said, back in her kitchen; 'Neither one of us has a right to ask you for anything you're not willing to give.' She really thought that she could only ask if he offered first. And that cut him to the bone. He wanted to be the one she turned to—no matter what she needed his help with, no matter what form that help might take.

"If it makes any difference, John, she won't reject you," Harold said at last. "I'm positive. She cares about you, deeply; trusts you with her life and her son. And she's just waiting until she knows how you feel before she trusts you with her heart. But until then, she's going to continue looking at your relationship from a quid-pro-quo standpoint, as she once called it."

And suddenly John realized he didn't want that. Didn't want Joss Carter to help them just because they helped her. Didn't want this constant running tally of what they owed each other.

He didn't want Joss to just be a friend and partner. He wanted her to be something more—and he wanted to be something more, for her, in return. He didn't know what that was…but he wanted to find out.

* * *

He stood back and surveyed his work with satisfaction.

There would be no crude cross made of whatever local materials happened to be nearby. Not for this one. This one he was going to take the time to do right, an end befitting the challenge she represented.

Women were useless. Weak and useless and stupid. He'd been surrounded by them in the Army; he'd seen, over and over again, how weak they really were.

Until someone had objected to his exposing the weakness of one particular female.

He clenched his fists around his hammer and nails. Stupid General Abernathy had had him court-martialed for rape and assault and battery. Because he'd been involved in keeping that stupid other female from bringing a good Colonel's career to an end. That had showed him just how weak the US Army was getting, how they were bowing to the 'necessity' of 'gender integration;' and making examples of good male officers because some stupid female trumped up charges against them. Even if he'd been allowed to stay in the Army after finishing his time at Leavenworth for the conviction, he wouldn't have; thoroughly disgusted with the practices and procedures that had brought down the Army he served, the Army his Uncle and Grandfather had died at Pearl Harbor for.

And his mother. He only had a hazy recollection of her. She drank excessively, did drugs, and let men pick her up and discard her when they were done. Young Tony had been horrified and disgusted at his mother's behavior, which had only reinforced his opinion that women were useless and weak and ignorant, only useful for one thing. And then one day she'd dropped him off at a social services office, signed him over to the care of the State, and disappeared. He'd never seen her again.

The bitches he'd been forced to serve under in the military weren't any better than his mother. And then one evening, he'd been walking the streets of New York after getting supplies for his cabin in Upstate New York and had seen a woman waving goodbye to her child. Annelise Murray. The child had been crying. Full of fury at her abandoning her child, he'd ambushed Murray, gagged and wrapped her jacket around her head before he beat her to death—so he could pretend it was his mother. Each blow had been repaying her back for her abandoning him—and then in a final insult, he'd slashed open her womb because she didn't deserve to be a mother.

And then, afraid he'd be caught, he'd fled.

He'd visited the local café in Phoenicia, New York, about four miles from his hidden cabin on Panther Mountain in New York's Catskill Forest Preserve, a few times over the next week. Just to watch the news. He didn't have television or electricity at his cabin, didn't want to, saw no need. But while the news had been full of the murder, there'd been no sign that anyone knew he was the killer, and he'd found out that she hadn't abandoned her child, she'd been sending the child for a visit to the father. Momentary guilt over this was quickly lost in the adrenaline rush of the murder, and he spent many nights cleaning himself up after recalling Murray's frantic thrashing.

He'd avoided the city, but finally had had no choice but to go in order to replenish supplies. And there he'd seen Dyana Spencer at a subway station, saying goodbye to her daughter. And so he'd killed again, the same way he'd done it two years ago. Except this time she'd been alive when he nailed her hands down and cut her open, and that exquisitely sick thrill he got watching her die had aroused him again…

But a camera had to have seen him, because now here was this new bitch, this cop bitch who had seen him and somehow knew that was him under the mask. She'd challenged him, her eyes sparking fire; had challenged his manhood, something which she should never have done, and in so doing put herself on his list.

But she didn't remind him of his mother. He'd watched the precinct for a couple of hours in another car he'd 'borrowed' and he'd watched her leave, pick up her son, and take him home. So she took care of her boy, and she didn't have strange men over, didn't do drugs, although he'd been sitting outside her house in that 'borrowed' car and saw a purple GTO drive up. Officer Carter had gotten into the car, but the man behind the wheel didn't drive away; he'd stayed, and Officer Carter had sat in the front passenger seat for a couple of minutes, then she'd gotten out.

It hadn't escaped Walker's notice that the man in the purple GTO waited for her to go in before he drove away. So. There was some sort of relationship there. Just another woman letting a man use her.

Still, in the two weeks since he'd left New York and come home, he'd been unable to get Officer Carter out of his mind. At first he'd been pissed that she'd dared challenge him—he, who had gotten away with two murders—but gradually he grew to enjoy the challenge she represented; how to break her, the same way he'd broken the other women. The same way he'd fantasized about breaking his own mother over the long nights he'd lain awake in the group homes and foster homes he'd grown up in. She wasn't going to be easy, that much he knew; she'd fight him, all the way. But he wanted to savor this, relish it; take his time. Unlike Annelise Murray, he wanted to see her face as he beat her—heck, he'd stay away from her eyes just so she could see what he had in store for her—Annelise's eyes would have swollen shut from his beating her and he hadn't cared at all.

But this one…he'd let her see what he was going to do. He wanted to see the fear in her eyes as he raised his fists, see the pain on her face as he used her body as a punching bag. He'd taken the time to make a proper crossbeam, real wood. Good ropes, proper ropes, not the stuff at the railyard. He'd gotten enough paracord to do the trick, knowing it was thin but strong, that it would bite into Officer Carter's skin, leaving marks and bruises after she was dead that would testify to the world that he'd broken her. He'd gotten new nails, too; not the old six-inch roofing nails from the ancient box in his basement that he'd used for the previous women. He'd purchased brand new ones in bright chrome from the hardware store in Phoenicia. He'd enjoy seeing her blood well up in the palm of her hand as he fixed her hands to the crossbeam, see the blood run down her foot from the pierced arch when he nailed her foot down. He would make sure she was still alive for that operation. Contrary to his usual custom, he'd make sure she was alive when he cut her open.

And afterward, as she twisted on the cross, as she finally broke from the pain and begged him to let her die, he'd take his ultimate reward, the reward she'd offer him with her obscenely splayed legs. Just thinking about it now excited him, and he put the hammer down long enough to seek relief, a temporary easing of the tightness in his loins. Maybe she'd last long enough for him to enjoy it more than once? She had fire, and spirit, and she was fit and healthy—he was sure she'd last a good long while. Her death might even satisfy him for longer than Annelise Murray's death had—two years.

And her son—well, he'd do just fine. Tony Walker had done just fine without his mother—better than he would have if he'd stayed with his mother. And the man who Officer Carter had seen outside her house—Walker liked what he saw of the guy. Tall, strong, a rugged hardness about him that spoke of a nature much like Walker's own, though with smile lines on his face that spoke of a regrettable tendency toward softness. Oh well, better the boy grow up with a male figure, any male figure, than with his mother. Mothers just made boys weak and useless like themselves.

Walker looked at the crossbeam leaning against the large tree. Perfect. He didn't have an upright yet, but he'd hollowed out a hole in the dirt for the base of the cross to fit into once he had an upright, so he could do a real crucifixion, leaving her hanging from the nails in her hands and feet until she died. He'd even thought for a while about whipping her, but that would take too much time and he wouldn't have the visceral, gut-deep satisfaction of feeling her internal organs rearrange under his punch, wouldn't be able to enjoy her heaving and retching from blows to her stomach. He'd avoid rupturing any internal organs this time, just so she'd last longer.

"Let's see how you do," he said as he put the hammer down on his workbench, leaned over, and picked up the paper he'd bought from the local watering hole in Phoenicia. Officer Carter had been prominently pictured on the front page, and he carefully extracted the picture from the newspaper now, tearing around the edges until it was more or less neat, then used a single small nail to anchor the newspaper photo into the wood, just where Carter's head would be. Perfect. The newspaper photo marked the cross as hers—she'd know it was hers as soon as she saw it.

That done, he started thinking about where he wanted to leave her body. There was a cave on the northwest face of Panther Mountain, and he'd left animal remains there for scavengers before—the deer he'd killed so he could eat, and so forth. Wouldn't be that hard to leave her body there for the animals to eat; they'd drag her bones off, and no crime scene investigator would find her bones in random piles of bear and mountain lion poop all over the mountain. Yes, that'd do very well. And he would keep her clothes, like he'd kept Annelise Murray's exercise pants, like he'd kept Dyana Spencer's slacks, like he'd kept each victim's cut up bra and nursed the remembrance of how he'd killed the woman during the long months that followed.

So go into the city, grab the woman, and run before she knew what happened to her, before the cops could find out she was missing. Once back here, he'd have all the time in the world to do what he wanted to do with her.


End file.
